Tag: life

The Way West (1950) – The World’s Longest Paper Chain and Other Impossible Things

~ Pulitzer Guy ~ Leave a comment
Not an AI generated photo. My paper chain skills remain solid.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.“

– Lao Tzu

When I was in the fourth grade, I was obsessed with the Guinness Book of World Records. For kids growing up before the internet, the Guinness book wasn’t really a reference book. It was a book of possibilities. Every page contained proof that ordinary people could become extraordinary simply by deciding to do something that no one else had ever done. There were the predictable records for the fastest, strongest, and tallest. There were also records for the longest fingernails, the heaviest twins, largest collection of belly-button lint, or number of spoons you could balance on your face. But there were also records that seemed wonderfully democratic. Anyone, at least in theory, could become a world record holder. You just had to pick the right record.

And it was that thought that led me to flip through those pages for hours until I found mine: the world’s longest paper chain.

To ten-year-old me, this was perfect. Unlike the world’s fastest runner or the tallest person, this one didn’t require unusual genetics or years of training. It required construction paper, glue, scissors, and determination. As far as I was concerned, those all seemed readily available.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

– Albert Einstein

I can’t recall now exactly how long the existing record was, but I do remember thinking it could absolutely be broken. You see, ten-year-old me was also pretty good at math. So instead of wondering whether we could break the record, I treated it like a word problem.

I timed myself making ten paper-chain links and connecting them together. Then I measured how long those ten links were. Once I had those data points, the rest was simple. If (a) one person could make X paper links every hour, (b) I recruited Y neighborhood kids, and (c) we all stayed awake for twenty-four straight hours, then (d) we would produce a paper chain longer than the existing world record.

The math worked perfectly.

Looking back, it seems obvious that point (c) was going to be the problem. Ten-year-old me, however, wasn’t worried about whether staying awake for twenty-four hours was realistic. I was worried about staffing. Without realizing it, I had created my first project plan.

Many hands make light work.”

– John Heywood

The recruiting campaign began. I went door to door convincing neighborhood kids that together we were about to become world record holders. Somehow, they bought in. Even more remarkably, so did my parents. They could have smiled politely and explained that maybe we should start with something smaller. Instead, they purchased what felt like an endless supply of construction paper and transformed our garage into mission control.

Soon there were kids everywhere, cutting strips, applying glue, looping one link through another, then another, then another. The pile of colored paper slowly transformed into something tangible. Every new link felt like progress toward history.

Then we encountered our first logistical problem. Where exactly do you put the world’s longest paper chain?

Fortunately, my dad had a solution. He installed measuring posts down the block so we could stretch the chain between them and calculate our progress. He never questioned the premise. He simply assumed that if we were attempting a world record, we’d need a reliable measurement system. (I’ve written about my dad a couple of times before, and this story deserves to be added to his growing list of extraordinary acts of parenting.)

Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.”

– Bobby Unser

One of my favorite subplots from Paper-Chain-Making Day concerned my realization that we’d eventually need to validate our achievement. I became so confident we were going to succeed that I called the local newspaper, the Arizona Republic. Mind you, I called them not after we’d broken the record. Not even when we were getting close. Before. Apparently, ten-year-old-me believed newspapers appreciated advance notice for impending world records.

The details are fuzzy now, but I remember looking up the newspaper’s phone number in the phone book and giving them a call. I’m not sure who answered, but I gave a very detailed explanation of our ambitious undertaking. To their credit, someone actually listened. Somewhere in the newsroom, someone apparently decided that a gang of fourth graders attempting to build the world’s longest paper chain was worth keeping an eye on. They say some stories write themselves. This wasn’t one of them.

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

– Mike Tyson

In the end, the math had been flawless. Reality was less cooperative.

Around dinnertime, cracks began to appear in my workforce. One kid had to go home because dinner was ready. Another had family plans. Someone else got tired. Another simply lost interest. One by one, my labor force evaporated. The calculations that had looked so elegant on paper hadn’t included parents. Or boredom. Or pizza. Or the simple reality that asking fourth graders to stay awake for twenty-four consecutive hours is, in retrospect, a terrible management strategy.

I don’t remember how close we got. I don’t remember how long the existing record actually was. I don’t remember what eventually happened to the enormous paper chain we’d created.

I do, however, remember the phone ringing sometime after we had called it quits. The reporter was calling back. I had to tell him we hadn’t broken the record after all. To be honest, I don’t remember whether he sounded disappointed, whether I only imagined he did, or whether I was simply hearing my own disappointment reflected back at me. Either way, our world-record attempt quietly became just another neighborhood story.

(Incidentally, the current Guinness World Record for the longest paper chain created by a team in twenty-four hours is 54.33 miles, set by Paul D. Camp Community College in Virginia in 2005. I remain convinced we were only a few hundred neighborhood kids short.)

The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail.”

– Louis L’Amour

My paper chain may not have gotten very far, but it turns out distance wasn’t really the point. I found the same lesson inside A. B. Guthrie Jr.’s The Way West, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1950, and is often considered the definitive literary novel of the Oregon Trail, capturing westward expansion not as myth, but as a difficult, messy, deeply human undertaking. Set in the 1840s, it follows a wagon train leaving Independence, Missouri, bound for the Oregon Territory. At the center of the story is Dick Summers, an experienced mountain man hired to guide dozens of families across nearly two thousand miles of wilderness. They leave with maps, supplies, livestock, carefully planned routes, and enough optimism to believe they can cross an entire continent.

At first, the journey seems almost mathematical. They know how many miles they hope to cover each day. They know where the rivers are. They know where they’ll camp. On paper, everything works. Then the West has its say.

Rivers become impassable. Storms destroy carefully laid plans. Tempers flare. Leaders are questioned. Friendships fracture. People become exhausted. Guthrie’s novel slowly reveals that the greatest obstacle to reaching Oregon isn’t the mountains or the rivers. It’s the travelers themselves. Every ambitious undertaking eventually stops being a logistical problem and starts becoming a human one. The maps don’t become wrong. They simply become incomplete because they can’t account for fear, stubbornness, fatigue, ego, or hope.

The Way West has aged remarkably well. Guthrie doesn’t romanticize the frontier the way many Westerns do. Instead, he treats westward expansion as a profoundly human enterprise, filled with courage, selfishness, resilience, pettiness, generosity, and doubt. The novel is rich in atmosphere and remarkably thoughtful about leadership and group dynamics, which is why it has remained a classic of the genre for more than seventy-five years. If it has a weakness, it’s that modern readers may find its deliberate pace a bit demanding. Like the wagon train itself, the novel doesn’t hurry. There are stretches where the journey feels repetitive, and Guthrie occasionally spends more time describing landscapes than developing individual characters. But that slow rhythm is also part of its power. By the time you reach Oregon, you feel as though you’ve crossed the continent alongside the travelers, one exhausting mile at a time.

By the time I reached the last page, I couldn’t help but think about my paper chain. My calculations weren’t wrong. If twenty neighborhood kids each produced a certain number of links every hour, we probably would have broken the record. What my spreadsheet failed to account for was exactly what Guthrie understood. Human beings get hungry. They get tired. They lose patience. They decide they’d rather be somewhere else.

The Oregon Trail had rivers and mountain passes. My expedition had pizza. Different obstacles, perhaps, but exactly the same lesson.

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”

– Vincent van Gogh

Guthrie understood something that applies just as well to wagon trains as paper chains. Every extraordinary accomplishment is really just an accumulation of ordinary actions repeated far more times than anyone thinks possible.

Writing a book is mostly writing one page after another. Running a marathon is mostly taking one more step. Learning a language is mostly showing up for one more lesson. Building the world’s longest paper chain is mostly making one more link. The pioneers in The Way West didn’t reach Oregon through one heroic act. They reached it one campsite, one river crossing, one difficult decision, and one exhausting day at a time.

It’s remarkable how often this lesson reappears. We eat an elephant one bite at a time. We climb mountains one step at a time. Cathedrals are built one stone at a time. James Clear encourages us to become one percent better every day. Jerry Seinfeld famously kept a calendar where the goal wasn’t to write something brilliant each day, only to “not break the chain.” Even writing Pulitzer Schmulitzer has turned out to be little more than reading one chapter, then another, then another. Different metaphors. Same truth.

The secret isn’t usually brilliance. It’s endurance.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”

– Teddy Roosevelt

For years, I thought this story was about failing to break a world record. Now I think it was really about getting the chance to try.

My parents never laughed. They bought the construction paper. They surrendered the garage. My dad installed measuring posts down the street because if his ten-year-old son was going to chase a world record, he’d need a proper way to measure it. For one glorious Saturday, they treated an impossible dream as though it were completely reasonable. Looking back, that may have been the greatest gift of all.

The pioneers in The Way West eventually discover that crossing the American frontier isn’t a triumph of maps. It’s a triumph of perseverance. The map can tell you where you’re going, but it can’t tell you whether you’ll keep walking when things get difficult. The same was true of my paper chain. Breaking the record was never going to depend on paper, glue, or multiplication. It was always going to depend on people.

The funny thing is, after all these years, I still think the math worked. We were simply solving for the wrong variable.

We never built the world’s longest paper chain. But for one unforgettable day, an entire neighborhood believed we just might. Looking back, I don’t remember how long the paper chain became. I only remember how long we believed it could become.

The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (1959): What We Bring Home

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Yesterday, Spain won the World Cup. The trophy was lifted. Confetti filled the air. As the tournament ended, the last wave of supporters headed home while millions of others were already back in dozens of countries, carrying whatever souvenirs they’d collected during a month in North America. Somewhere among them was a Norwegian soccer star with a taxidermied raccoon.

There really isn’t another sporting event like the World Cup. Every four years, for one extraordinary month, national identity becomes the world’s most popular spectator sport. People who spend the rest of their lives arguing about politics, religion, or almost anything else suddenly find themselves united behind the same eleven players wearing the same colors. The tournament doesn’t belong to clubs or leagues. It belongs to countries.

The Olympics come closest, but they’re fundamentally different. The Olympics celebrate breadth, asking us to marvel at hundreds of events across dozens of sports. The World Cup is almost monastic in its focus. Twenty-two players. One ball. One trophy. For a month, a substantial portion of humanity cares about exactly the same thing. (As an aside, this BBC montage of the tournament is fantastic.)

But as much as I love the soccer, that wasn’t what made this tournament unforgettable. It was the travelers.

I was lucky enough to attend several matches myself during this World Cup. The first was Switzerland versus Qatar. If I’m being honest, I didn’t particularly care who won. It didn’t matter. Forty thousand people around me cared enough for all of us.

For two hours, I borrowed their passion. Fans sang songs I’d never heard. Flags I’d rarely seen outside geography textbooks waved in every direction. Every completed pass, every missed opportunity, every referee’s whistle felt monumental because the people around me treated it that way. Their enthusiasm became my enthusiasm.

A week later, Parisa and I landed in Mexico City on the night (coincidentally) Mexico was playing at the Azteca. I’ve been fortunate to visit a lot of cities. I’ve never seen one quite like that.

Every restaurant had its televisions pointed toward the match. Every plaza filled with people hours before kickoff. Cars rolled through intersections with enormous Mexican flags streaming from their windows while complete strangers shouted “¡México!” across traffic and received equally enthusiastic replies. The city wasn’t simply watching soccer. It was participating in it.

A few days later, we joined a taco tour and met a man from South Africa who may become the person I remember most from this entire World Cup. He had flown from Johannesburg to Mexico City for South Africa’s opening match. Then he flew to New York, rented a car, drove to Atlanta for the second game, and eventually made his way to Monterrey for the final group-stage match. Thousands of miles, two countries, and countless hours on airplanes and highways, all to follow one national team.

Naturally, we asked him about his trip. What had been his favorite part of North America? The tacos? Times Square? The mountains? The people? He smiled. “Buc-ee’s.”

We laughed. Not because he was wrong – Buc–ees is undeniably amazing – but because his answer was wonderfully specific. He wasn’t talking about the rows of gas pumps or the oversized beaver mascot. He was talking about the employees shouting, “Fresh brisket on the board!” every time another brisket came out of the smoker. Somehow that joyful little chant had become the story he was most excited to carry home to Johannesburg.

The more I thought about it, the more perfect his answer seemed. Throughout the tournament I kept seeing visitors fall in love with things most of us stopped noticing years ago. A Brazilian couldn’t believe the size of American pickup trucks. A German was delighted by free refills. An English supporter became inexplicably obsessed with ranch dressing. Another visitor wondered why every drink contained enough ice to preserve a woolly mammoth.

None of them were discovering hidden treasures. They were discovering ordinary North America. That’s what travel does. It edits our stories.

Nobody comes home talking about baggage claim or the hotel room. We remember the ordinary things that felt extraordinary because they were unfamiliar: the bartender who insisted we try the local beer, the tiny bakery we found after a wrong turn, the Tokyo 7-Eleven selling fresh meals, or the Nordic hotel that solved blanket stealing with two separate duvets.

None of those moments would appear in a travel brochure, yet they are often the ones that stay with us. Travel sharpens our attention. It makes us notice the small customs, habits, and encounters that locals stopped seeing long ago. Sometimes it takes going halfway around the world to discover something new. Sometimes it takes a visitor to help us see what was already there.

That realization brought me back to Robert Lewis Taylor’s The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction in 1959. Like every great travel story, the novel begins with a destination. Twelve-year-old Jaimie McPheeters and his physician father, Sardius, leave Missouri in 1849, joining thousands of Americans heading west after news of gold in California. Like nearly everyone around them, they believe California promises reinvention. Wealth. Adventure. A chance to begin again.

The farther west they travel, however, the less important California becomes. Instead, Taylor fills the trail with an astonishing parade of humanity: gamblers, prospectors, swindlers, preachers, doctors, merchants, soldiers, entertainers, pioneers, widows, dreamers, and drifters. Some become companions for hundreds of pages. Others disappear almost as quickly as they arrive, continuing down the trail and out of the novel forever. At first, the structure feels almost chaotic. Taylor keeps introducing fascinating people just as you’re settling into the last group. Characters drift into Jaimie’s life, dominate a few chapters, and then quietly move on. If you’re a reader accustomed to tightly engineered plots, you may wonder whether the novel is ever going to settle down.

Eventually, though, you realize Taylor isn’t losing control of the novel. He’s recreating what travel actually feels like. When we remember a trip, the itinerary fades long before the people do.

That’s Jaimie’s gift. He’s curious in the way children often are before adulthood convinces us we should already know everything worth knowing. He asks questions. He listens. He notices details everyone else overlooks. His greatest talent isn’t surviving the frontier. It’s paying attention. By the time he finally reaches California, the Gold Rush itself almost feels incidental. The real treasure had been traveling beside him all along.

In some ways, this World Cup felt like a twenty-first-century version of Jaimie McPheeters’ journey. In 1849, Americans crossed a continent searching for opportunity. In 2026, the world crossed an ocean to visit us. The direction changed, but the lesson didn’t. The journey was never really about the destination. It was about the people encountered along the way.

Months before the tournament began, newspapers devoted endless coverage to whether North America was ready to host the World Cup. Would the airports work? Would transportation collapse? Would there be enough hotel rooms? Would security hold?

They were fair questions. By the end of the tournament, though, I found myself asking a different one: Were we good hosts? I think so. Not because every train ran on time or traffic wasn’t terrible. Visitors rarely remember logistics. They remember how a place made them feel. They’ll remember the strangers who made an unfamiliar country feel unexpectedly familiar.

One of my favorite parts of this World Cup was watching patriotism quietly give way to hospitality. Flags stopped feeling like political statements and became invitations to conversation. Adults who normally avoid eye contact found themselves talking in airport terminals, train stations, breweries, food halls, and stadium concourses. The questions were almost always the same: Where are you from? How long are you here? Where are you headed next? What shouldn’t I miss? For one month, strangers became neighbors. I suspect that’s the souvenir many visitors carried home.

Like many Pulitzer winners from the middle of the twentieth century, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters won’t be for everyone. Readers looking for a tightly plotted adventure may find its pace frustrating. Taylor is perfectly willing to wander away from the central narrative because another interesting person happens to cross Jaimie’s path. Entire episodes exist simply to let us spend time with someone we’d never have invented ourselves.

Ironically, that’s exactly what makes the novel memorable. Taylor understands something every experienced traveler eventually learns: the detours aren’t interruptions. They’re the destination.

I’ve already forgotten who scored Switzerland’s goal against Qatar, and before long I’ll probably have to look up parts of the knockout bracket as well. That’s what happens with sports. Results blur together until only the champion remains. The people don’t.

I’ll remember the South African who somehow found his favorite memory of North America in a Buc-ee’s brisket chant. I’ll remember Erling Haaland deciding that the souvenir he couldn’t leave behind was a taxidermied raccoon from a western store in Dallas. On the surface, they couldn’t have been more different. And yet they were really the same story.

Like Jaimie McPheeters, they discovered that travel isn’t measured by the miles you cover or the landmarks you visit. It’s measured by the unexpected moments you never could have planned. Travel has never been about collecting places. It’s about collecting stories.

Millions of visitors returned home with jerseys, scarves, photographs, and souvenirs. I suspect the things they’ll treasure most, though, are the stories they never expected to collect.

So did I.

Mine just never left North America.

The Edge of Sadness (1962): The Long Afterlife of Kindness

~ Pulitzer Guy ~ 1 Comment

As graduation season comes to a close, I’ll admit I have a soft spot for commencement speeches. There is something charming about the whole enterprise. Every spring, universities invite an accomplished person to stand in front of thousands of young people and attempt the impossible task of distilling a lifetime of wisdom into twenty minutes.

I’ll also admit that I probably won’t miss this year’s crop of speeches that were less inspiring than usual. Instead of memorable advice, many ceremonies generated news because students booed speakers who dared mention artificial intelligence. These might have made for good headlines, but I miss the speeches that aimed a little higher.

I miss Steve Jobs telling Stanford graduates that “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” I miss Matthew McConaughey advising students that happiness is not the same thing as joy, and that chasing the former often gets in the way of finding the latter. And I miss Jerry Seinfeld, who’s speech at Duke I happened to see in person, giving more lighthearted guidance: “Do not lose your sense of humor. Not enough of life makes sense for you to survive without it.” Whether you agreed with them or not, those speeches were trying to answer the biggest questions: How should we live? What matters? What will we regret?

One of my favorites came from author George Saunders at Syracuse University in 2013. Saunders began with a familiar commencement premise: an older person reflecting on a life filled with mistakes. He talked about embarrassing moments, bad jobs, and various youthful misadventures. Then he surprised everyone. The thing he regretted most wasn’t a career decision, a financial mistake, or some missed opportunity.

It was a girl.

When Saunders was in seventh grade, a shy new student arrived at his school. She was awkward, frequently teased, and painfully lonely. Saunders wasn’t cruel to her. He never joined in the bullying. Occasionally, he even defended her. But he didn’t do enough. Years later, what haunted him wasn’t anything he had done. It was what he hadn’t done.

“What I regret most in my life,” he told the graduates, “are failures of kindness.”

Not acts of cruelty. Failures of kindness. The distinction is important. Most of us can think of moments when we weren’t our best selves. Saunders was talking about something more subtle. He was talking about those times when another person was suffering right in front of us and we responded, in his words, “sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.” We saw the need and chose not to fully engage.

Then Saunders asked a question that has stuck with me ever since I first heard this speech: “What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder?”

It’s a question that feels especially relevant today. We live in a culture obsessed with achievement. We tell graduates to dream big, work hard, change the world, build companies, make money, find success.  To be clear, I’m not against any of those things and Saunders wasn’t either. His point was simply that, when we look back on our lives, our deepest regrets may not be about ambition at all.

They may be about people.

Maybe we can / Find a place to feel good / And we can treat people with kindness “

– Harry Styles, “Treat People with Kindness”

Which brings me to The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O’Connor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 1962. At first glance, it seems like an odd companion to a graduation speech. Commencement addresses are usually delivered to people standing at the beginning of their adult lives, full of ambition and possibility. The Edge of Sadness is about people who have already lived most of theirs.

O’Connor’s novel follows Father Hugh Kennedy, a middle-aged Catholic priest returning to his old Boston parish after years away. Once considered a rising star in the Church, Kennedy has spent time recovering from alcoholism and carries more than his share of disappointments, doubts, and regrets. If graduation speeches ask, “What kind of life should I build?” The Edge of Sadness asks a different question: “What happens when the life you built doesn’t quite turn out the way you imagined?”

Back in Boston, Kennedy reconnects with the Carmody family, wealthy Irish Catholics he has known for years. On the surface, they seem successful and enviable. But beneath that polished exterior are broken relationships, loneliness, addiction, resentment, and grief. As Kennedy becomes entangled in their lives, he finds himself serving less as a traditional priest and more as a witness to the quiet suffering that people carry behind closed doors.

What struck me most about the book was how ordinary the sources of suffering are. Nobody sets out to hurt anyone. Instead, the damage comes from smaller failures. People withdraw when they should engage. They protect themselves when they should be vulnerable. They hold back words that should be spoken. They choose pride over understanding. Again and again, people fail to fully show up for one another.

Which brings us back to George Saunders. When Saunders talks about his regret over the lonely girl in seventh grade, he is careful to point out that he wasn’t mean to her. His regret is that he wasn’t kinder.

That same idea runs throughout The Edge of Sadness. The characters aren’t suffering because they were surrounded by evil people. They are suffering because they were surrounded by ordinary people. People who were busy, distracted, frightened, proud, wounded, ambitious, or uncertain. In other words, people very much like the rest of us. While Saunders asks his audience, “What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder?”, O’Connor spends an entire novel exploring the consequences of that question.

One of the most hopeful aspects of both the speech and the novel is that neither views kindness as some grand heroic act. Saunders isn’t urging graduates to solve world hunger. Father Kennedy isn’t performing miracles. Both are talking about something smaller and, therefore, more difficult: paying attention to the people directly in front of us. Noticing loneliness. Extending grace. Choosing compassion over judgment. Making the extra phone call. Asking the follow-up question. Staying in the conversation a little longer.

You’ve got to try a little kindness / Yes, show a little kindness / Just shine your light for everyone to see“

– Glen Campbell, “Try a Little Kindness”

As I was thinking about Saunders’s speech, I found myself returning to a story I told a few months ago in my post about The Reivers and a Super 8 movie called The Meat Eater that I had made when I was twelve years old with two friends, Jamie and Dave. The movie itself was ridiculous. Dave played a serial killer. Jamie played a detective. I played the victim. Repeatedly. There was ketchup, hamburger meat, and an alarming lack of adult supervision. But the story ended up being about something else.

I also mentioned that after my mother died between seventh and eighth grade, Jamie was unusually kind to me. Nothing dramatic. No grand gesture. He simply spent time with me during a period when I needed friends more than I probably understood. Decades later, I still remember it. When Jamie and I reconnected last year and I mentioned it to him, he seemed genuinely surprised. He barely remembered it happening.

A few months later, on a whim, I tracked down Dave. The last time I had seen him was when we were teenagers. After freshman year of high school, he and his mother moved to San Diego, and like so many friendships in the pre-internet era, ours simply disappeared. Today, if someone moves away, you still see photos of their vacations, their kids, and their lunch choices. Back then, when someone left, they were simply gone. You had no idea what happened to them. They just vanished into the static.

Somehow, through a remarkably lucky Google search, I discovered that Dave lived less than a mile from me. Last week, we met for dinner and spent the evening laughing about The Meat Eater, filling in gaps in each other’s memories, and marveling at the strange paths our lives had taken.

And, echoing the conversation I had with Jamie, during our dinner, Dave told me something I had completely forgotten. Toward the end of junior high, his parents divorced and this had been much harder on him than I ever knew. He told me that one of the things that helped him through that difficult period was our group of friends.

“We had so much fun,” he said.

He said that giving up that friend group was the hardest thing about the move to San Diego. Then he told me something even more surprising. After moving away, he continued having dreams about us well into his thirties. I was stunned.

For Dave, our little group of friends wasn’t just a collection of kids riding bikes, making bad horror films and wasting summer afternoons. It was a refuge during one of the most difficult periods of his young life. The memories stayed with him for decades.

I had no memory of any of that. Just as Jamie didn’t remember being kind to me, I didn’t remember being there for Dave. And that’s the part of George Saunders’s speech that feels truer to me every year.

Kindness don’t ask for much / But an open mind / Kindness can cure a broken heart / Honey, are you feelin’ kind?”

– Ryan Adams, “Kindness”

When Saunders talks about kindness, he’s not describing grand acts of heroism. He’s talking about the small opportunities that present themselves in ordinary life. The lonely kid sitting by herself. The friend whose mother has died. The classmate whose family is falling apart. The person standing quietly at the edge of the group. Most of the time we don’t know which moments matter.

In my conversation with Jamie, I learned that afternoons spent playing with my dad’s early home computer helped spark an interest that eventually led him into the tech industry. In my conversation with Dave, I learned that friendships I had largely forgotten became some of the most cherished memories of his childhood. And in both cases, the people involved remembered those moments far more clearly than I did. Which is perhaps the most beautiful thing about kindness. The effects can last far longer than our memory of giving it.

George Saunders told a group of graduates that his greatest regrets were failures of kindness. More than a decade later, I think the inverse may be true as well. Some of the most meaningful things we ever do may be acts of kindness so small that we don’t even remember them.

The world spends a lot of time telling graduates to think about their future. Their career. Their success. Their ambitions. That’s understandable. But George Saunders and Edwin O’Connor remind us that when we eventually look back on our lives, what we remember most vividly may not be our accomplishments at all.

It may be the people. The friend who showed up. The person who made us feel less alone. The afternoon that seemed ordinary at the time. The kindness that neither person realized would matter for the next forty years.

You may be creating one of their favorite memories without even realizing it.

The Reivers (1963): The Unexpected Afterlife of The Meat Eater

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After my brother Scott received his initial cancer diagnosis in 2021, I started making more frequent trips to Phoenix to see him. During many of those visits to his house, he began pulling things out of the past like a magician who had decided, late in his career, to specialize in nostalgia. Baseball cards. Old records. Toys I hadn’t thought about in decades. Artifacts from shelves that, in my mind, had long since been cleared, boxed up, or lost to time.

And then one day, he handed me a Super 8 film.

“I don’t know what this is,” he said.

Which, if you think about it, is exactly the kind of sentence that should make you both excited and slightly nervous.

When I got back home, I took it to a local shop to have it digitized. A few days later, I went back to pick it up, and the guy behind the counter was smiling in a way that suggested I was about to become either very proud or mildly horrified.

“I don’t know what this is,” he said, echoing my brother almost word for word, “but it’s the best thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

That felt promising. Or at least memorable.

I rushed home, opened the link, and hit play. It was a movie I had made when I was twelve years old with my friends Jamie and Dave. A full-blown cinematic production titled The Meat Eater, which is exactly as subtle and nuanced as it sounds.

The casting was tight. Jamie was the detective. Dave was the serial killer. And I, displaying an early commitment to range, was the victim. Multiple times.

Jamie, it’s worth noting, was a very popular kid. The kind of kid who didn’t need to spend his afternoons making low-budget horror films. And yet, for a stretch of time—right around the period after my mom passed away between seventh and eighth grade—he did. We weren’t best friends, but he was kind to me during a time when kindness mattered more than I probably knew how to articulate. Looking back, that feels like a bigger part of the story than anything we actually put on film.

The premise of The Meat Eater was simple. Dave would kill me, and then, in a bold narrative choice that really pushed the boundaries of suburban storytelling, he would eat me. To achieve this effect, we purchased hamburger meat, placed it on my stomach, and covered it in ketchup. This was our special effects department. It was meant to be funny. And it was. Just not in the ways we’d eventually come to appreciate.

What makes the whole thing remarkable, watching it now, is not just the plot—which holds up about as well as you’d expect—but the complete absence of supervision. No parents. An alarming number of BB guns. At one point, we were jumping off the roof of Jamie’s house into the swimming pool, which felt like a perfectly reasonable idea at the time and, in retrospect, like something that probably should have required at least one adult in the general vicinity. And through all of it, an unwavering confidence that what we were making was not just a movie, but important.

And honestly, it kind of works. Not because it’s good, exactly, but because it’s so fully committed to being whatever it is. There’s plenty of humor in it, and we were very much in on the joke. But there’s no distance. No sense that we were making something disposable or temporary. Just three kids, a camera, and the firm belief that a hamburger and some ketchup could carry an entire narrative.

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”

– Pink Floyd, “Time”

Which, in a strange way, is exactly what The Reivers is about.

Published just a month before two time Pulitzer winner William Faulkner died, The Reivers won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963. It’s often described as a lighter, more accessible Faulkner, which is a bit like saying a roller coaster is a more accessible form of flying. Or that a bar fight is a more accessible form of conflict resolution. Or that a road trip with questionable decision-makers is a more accessible version of growing up. Technically true, but still not something you approach casually.

The novel tells the story of Lucius Priest, an eleven-year-old boy in Mississippi, who embarks on an impulsive road trip with two companions: Boon Hogganbeck, a charming and reckless family friend, and Ned McCaslin, a resourceful and morally flexible man who may or may not be the most competent adult in the group. What begins as a simple joyride quickly turns into something else entirely, involving stolen cars, questionable decisions, a detour through a brothel, and a series of escalating consequences that none of the participants are fully equipped to handle. It is, in other words, a perfect childhood adventure disguised as a very bad idea.

What elevates The Reivers beyond mischief is the way it’s told. The entire novel is narrated by an older Lucius, looking back on the events of his youth with a mix of affection, embarrassment, and hard-earned clarity. The story hasn’t changed, exactly, but the meaning of it has. At the time, it felt like freedom. Later, it looks a lot like chaos. At the time, it felt like courage. Later, it edges closer to recklessness. At the time, it was just something that happened. Later, it becomes a story worth telling.

For me, The Reivers sits somewhere in the lower middle of the Pulitzer rankings. It’s undeniably enjoyable, occasionally chaotic, and filled with moments that linger, but it doesn’t quite reach the emotional or stylistic heights of Faulkner at his best. What it does offer, though, is something a little different. It reminds us that not every meaningful story needs to be heavy. Sometimes it’s enough to capture a moment in time, let it unfold with all its messiness intact, and trust that meaning will reveal itself later.

These are the days you’ll remember.”

– 10,000 Maniacs, “These Are Days”

Watching The Meat Eater, I had the same feeling. The same sense that what once felt immediate and important now reads as something slightly different—messier, funnier, and, in its own way, more meaningful.

At twelve, we weren’t making something ironic or self-aware. We were absolutely trying to be funny, and at least to us, we were succeeding. But we were also making something we believed in, with the full force of our limited resources and unlimited confidence. We thought we were telling a funny story. We didn’t realize we were becoming one.

And like Lucius, I’m now the one looking back, trying to make sense of it. Trying to reconcile the seriousness of the experience then with the absurdity of it now. Trying to understand how something so small—a few minutes of film, a hamburger, a bad idea—could carry so much weight decades later. Because it’s not really about the movie. It’s about the people in it.

I lost track of Dave after elementary school. Somewhere along the way, the thread just snapped, the way those threads tend to do. One day you’re making a film together in a backyard, and the next you’re living entirely separate lives without even realizing when the transition happened.

Jamie, though, stayed in orbit a little longer. Although he started high school at a boarding school, he came back to Phoenix and we ended up at the same high school for senior year. Then, like most people, we drifted.

But when I found the video, I sent it to him. No context. No warning. Just a digital time capsule dropped into his phone.

And recently, when I was in Phoenix, we met up for a drink. It had been decades. And yet within minutes, we were right back there, talking about The Meat Eater, laughing about scenes we hadn’t thought about in years, filling in gaps in each other’s memories like two slightly unreliable historians reconstructing a very low-budget crime.

At some point in the conversation, I also told him I still remembered how he had treated me during that time after my mom died, and that it had meant a lot to me. And then, a few minutes later, Jamie told me something I didn’t know. He said that one of the reasons he ended up going into the tech field was because of my dad. Back then, my dad had brought one of the early home computers into school, and when Jamie would come over, we’d spend hours playing games on it.

I had no memory of that meaning anything beyond what it was at the time. Just something to do. Another way to pass an afternoon. But for Jamie, it stuck. It mattered. It shaped something.

Which is the part of all of this that I can’t quite get over. The idea that these small, seemingly insignificant moments—a Super 8 film, a shared afternoon, an early computer—don’t just disappear. They ripple outward in ways you don’t see, connecting people and decisions and lives long after the moment itself has passed.

It’s strange what survives. Not the things you expect. Not the moments that feel important while you’re living them. But a shared memory that refuses to fade completely, even as everything around it changes.

In The Reivers, Faulkner suggests that we don’t really understand our lives while we’re living them. We understand them later, in the telling. In that sense, The Meat Eater wasn’t just a movie. It was the beginning of a story that took forty-five years to understand.

And somehow, improbably, it’s still doing what it was always meant to do.

Not bringing people back, exactly. But reminding you they were never entirely gone in the first place.

P.S.

On a whim, after finishing this essay, I tried to find Dave. Facebook came up empty, which felt about right. But a quick Google search turned up a psychologist who lives less than a mile from me with the same name.

So I emailed him. Just a short note asking if he had grown up in Phoenix and if he happened to remember me.

Unbelievably, it was him.

I sent him the video.

This was his response:

“Oh my god that’s insane! I had no memory of that, but after watching it, now have a faint recollection of it. What a solid production. Sorry I had to kill you so many times and eat your organs. I guess that’s why I always had this feeling of having a part of you with me all this time!”

Which, all things considered, feels like about as good an explanation as any.