Massachusetts: Falling In

All of a sudden, the favored season is here. The summer - eventful and memorable as it was - has come and gone in a flash. Moving day is past, and the kids are back in school. Jordan’s now the oldest kid at his daycare, and it’ll soon be time for us to look into his next steps. Meanwhile, life marches on. I’m heading toward my final distance run this training season, followed by a prolonged taper into my first full marathon in October. In between - time with family, time with friends, an unexpected but welcome upcoming visit to Maryland (Jordan’s first), the usual autumn projects, and a host of new challenges and directions in the workplace. I’m trying to get deeper into prose writing; even photography feels more intentional. But it’s not easy to juggle the hats, to pivot from one mode to another, to tend to all the varied parts of me that make up the kinda-functional whole. Time, as always, is the limiting reagent. Fall, for me, is always a marker of time’s passage in my life. Especially here in New England, it is the most beautiful season, the most ephemeral one, the time that makes me look inward and forward. I make my resolutions in the fall, rather than with the new calendar year. And every fall, certain commonalities emerge that, if one views them only superficially, make it seem like little-to-nothing has changed at all. Another academic year, another foliage shoot. The window units come out, the days grow shorter. Once again, gathering fallen maple leaves from the sidewalk.

And yet, so much has changed. A year ago, I was preparing for my first half-marathon in five years - nervous as hell, with no thoughts of ever achieving more; today, I can wake up after any decent night of sleep and run twenty miles for kicks. A year ago, I was taking field naturalist coursework; today, it is gratifying to look around and realize how many patterns, plants, and species I recognize (and know a lotta shit about) in my surrounding world and neighborhood. A year ago, I was grappling with my roles as a father, a husband, and a human being who wanted to be more than my normative roles; today, I’m still grappling, but a lot more comfortable with who I am and where I am in life. I am where I need to be. I’m going where I need to go, and doing what I need to do. There’s still not enough time. But I’ll get there eventually. And I’m looking forward to what comes next.

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September 6, 2025: A morning visit to Walden Pond with Jane, Jordan, and my parents on their last weekend with us this month. It’s our first time visiting this place since five years ago (almost to the day), and so much about us (and so little about Walden) has changed. The pond’s southern shoreline is heavily fenced off for construction of a new bathhouse for swimmers and boaters, and the weekend atmosphere is no more peaceful or idyllic than it was during the pandemic. But such is life nearly two centuries after Thoreau’s time. We take a family selfie with his statue (Henry holding the phone), and Jordan spends an hour tramping around the shore and tossing rocks into the water, before we move on to Concord to explore the annual Ag Day farmer’s market.

September 10, 2025: My annual self-imposed, self-care day on the Wednesday before fellowship interviews get underway (thrice makes a tradition, right?). I take a long, ranging morning walk through South Brookline, documenting the first signs of fall creeping in along the Emerald Necklace, and grabbing an outdoor lunch with Turkish ice cream at Dolma Mediterranean Cuisine. At Wards Pond, I photograph the swan family we have been visiting intermittently since the spring - the cygnets all grown but still bearing their downy juvenile feathers. “They grow up so fast,” says the lady at pond-side with me. “I want to see them fly,” I respond.

September 13-14, 2025: A night in the woods. After our brief but enjoyable car camping night at Wompatuck in June, Jordan can’t stop talking about camping. He wants to call Ah-Ma and Ah-Gong from the tent. We drive up to Harold Parker State Forest in Andover, where we pitch said tent (which is large enough to hold half our household belongings) in an Eastern white pine forest beside Frye Pond. Jordan’s carsickness / mild GI bug notwithstanding, we have a fun time exploring the woods, learning about plants and animals (Indian cucumber, poison ivy, and spiders - woo-hoo!), listening for crickets, frogs, and owls at night, and whisper-partying in the tent before dawn. In the morning, after catching sunrise by the pond, we drive up to our favorite breakfast spot in the entire Commonwealth - Smolak Farms in North Andover, whose farmstand, orchard, farm animals, and rainbow train playground have become something of an early fall tradition.

October 11-12, 2025: Some phone snaps from the long-awaited race. Jane, Jordan, and I head down to Falmouth so that I can run the Cape Cod Marathon on Sunday, October 12th. I’ve been training for this all year, and the weekend after my 35th birthday is a festive one. Sadly, it’s not the coastal race I was hoping to run: heavy rain and wind from an incoming nor’easter; a stiflingly hot anti-rain visor (never wear new gear on race day!), and a tough couple of weeks of taper (turned into busy travel, work, and generally being careless about eating, sleeping, and staying race-ready) means I over-exert more than I realize in the early going. By the time I realize, it’s too late: I’ve perfectly executed my desired pace, but wind up bonking at mile 13 and run-walking my way through cramps for the back half of the race, through an increasingly torrential downpour. It’s my lousiest performance in over a decade (since I cramped hard in my first half-marathon), and yet - I finished! And under my original goal of 5 hours, though not under my eventual stretch goal of 4:30. The lessons are well-learned for next time. (Wait, next time?!) Well, it’ll probably be awhile before I run another marathon. The duration and intensity of training for this distance simply takes so much out of my life. Weight and muscle loss (impossible to keep on mass regardless of how much I eat and train, for the first time ever); finishing work late at night (in order to squeeze in daylight runs during weekdays); and countless 3 AM wake-ups (to avoid missing an entire Saturday morning each week with my cuties) have made this one of the most physically demanding years of my thirty-five. I do want to continue with some speedwork (perhaps scaling back to the half-marathon distance) this winter. Assuming my toenails ever return to something resembling healthy, I don’t think my running days are over quite yet. We’ll see, then…

Five Years Later

We recently passed the five-year anniversary of our move to Boston. Five years at my place of work; I got (ta-da) an insulated mug in the mail as a gift from the hospital (for my years of service, my favorite thing: kitchen clutter). Five years since we uprooted our lives and started a new one here in the Bay State. Much has changed between thirty and (quite soon) thirty-five. An intervening pandemic. A new life. A continual learning process in both the personal and professional spheres of my life. Enough upheaval for (what feels like) a lifetime. Parenthood.

And in some ways, so little has changed. My walking commute to my office, which takes me over the Muddy River. Watching the vegetation grow up along the streambank each spring (including tall tangles of knotweed and bittersweet, unfortunately).  Seeing the geese go, and return; the mallard ducklings; the herons fishing for breakfast across the street from the Fenway; the red-tailed hawk pair that nests atop our cancer center soaring high above the hospital buildings of the Longwood Medical Area, during my weekend long runs along the Necklace and down to the Charles River Esplanade. The continual soul-searching has never stopped, the periodic realignments of head and heart, the efforts toward intention and action and love and kindness. The always figuring it out.

Five years is a long enough time for anyone being objective to feel it must mean something. We’ve lived here in Massachusetts for over half the duration of our preceding stint in Maryland. One might ask if it feels like home yet, or if we’ve put down roots. Yes and no. Yes – we have our lifeway. We are part of this place, we know the fauna and flora and the local parks and trees and rocks, at least here in our little piece of the semi-suburbs. On our little walks, Jordan points out different-colored hydrangeas; the singular pear growing on a tiny shrub at the end of the block; the ghost stickers that say “Ha-ha!” on the window of the senior living facility on the way to the train station. Two years old and well on his way to three, he can name birch and oak and maple, and he loves playing with the “helicopter seeds” of the latter. I show him river grape (edible), pokeweed (definitely not), serviceberry (“xiao-niao berries” – bird berries! he cries), dogwood. We walk down to the Muddy River in the evening and he tosses pebbles in the water, talks to the ducks, completely lacks any fear of larger waterfowl (from whom Jane and I have learned to keep our distance), makes up gibberish bilingual-toddler names for random stones. He has spent a blessed two years (nearly) at his in-home daycare down the street from our house; made good friends, talks about them constantly and looks forward to meeting them at the park; enjoys his rice and beans and his chicken tikka with basmati and his fried rice and anything with rice and sauce, basically, aside from dino nuggets and pizza. He knows his subway stops along the D line, all the way from Newton Centre to Park Street, and he spends most of his waking hours talking about what trains he’s ridden, what trains he’s seen, which trains he wants to ride, where he hopes they’ll take him, and so forth. He imagines people waving to him from the window of his toy train. He waves back. I see this whole place in dual reality, through my eyes and his. To my child, this is home.

And yet, no – is this home? Still, five years later, I feel this core of grief that never went away, and probably never will. This sense of having lost something so profound and beautiful and infinite that time and meditation and mindful self-reflection may never replace it. This sense of transition, this awareness of limitation, this persistent feeling of being on my way somewhere, coming from someplace else. I’ve always felt this, dating back to Baltimore. I’ve written about it for over ten years. I’ve wondered at times if I’m somehow traumatized, somehow wounded in some fundamental way, that I can never rest and experience the transcendent peace and love that I’ve been yearning for. I meditate on it, and I funnel my meditative failure into a place of explosive growth. The most spiritually attuned I’ve ever been in my life. The most physically fit I’ve ever been in my life. The most present and aligned with my core beliefs I’ve felt in a long time. And still. Something missing. Some important value that I haven’t mapped. I’m opening up to the world in ways I haven’t in many years (e.g. dating). I’m looking to be changed, or at least challenged. I’m leaning into everything I worried I couldn’t be; fear has become a dear friend, and I welcome at least a little trace of him into my being every day. I’m not sure any of this is the answer, but I’m trying.

An odd phenomenon – time dilating and shrinking as the waymarkers of our life become unevenly spaced, as our milestones evolve from academic calendars and graduations to long-term plans and lifetime goals. Five years hasn’t felt like five years – it has felt impossibly long in some respects (work and career) and ridiculously short in others (Jordan speaking bilingually in paragraphs and asking “Why?” to everything we say – wasn’t he just recently a giggling milkfat baby who would stay stuck in whichever spot we set him down in?). And still, the land abides, and the region’s hardwood forests where we walk and camp, and the fields and farmstands we visit, and the little streams we criss and cross, and the lakes and ponds we sit beside and where Jordan pretends to fish. There’s something constant and beautiful here, something unquestionably good, something beyond doubt or reason or wonderment. If that isn’t a marker of home, then at least may it be a place of rest, a place from which we and our little one can take root, and give back, and grow.

Massachusetts: Turning the Wheel

“The fire burns. The pages turn.”
— Jordan, ominously, on seeing a campfire for the first time

The great wheel keeps turning, and summer is upon us again in the Bay State. In a flash, we have a 2.5-year-old toddler who can speak two languages in complex sentences (“The helicopter brings the spider to the hospital to see the doctor!” he says while watching a game that involves none of those subjects or objects), who loves to hum and dance and sing, who is suddenly potty-trained after some quick practice during the week I was in Spain, and whose chubby arms and chunky legs have lengthened into lanky little-boy limbs. Jordan has become even more of a sweetheart, very good at saying ‘thank you’ (still working on consistency of ‘please’), equally capable of hugging me tightly and telling me loves me, or telling me to get out of “Jordan and mama’s” room and go back to mine. He’s started calling me Daddy instead of BaBa for some reason. And he’s developed a love of being outside, of playing with his best daycare friends in the park, scrounging around in the dirt, and exploring in the woods. We’re spending the early part of the summer taking our mobile monster into green spaces and doing more things in the great outdoors with him; up next (over the coming months) are a lakeside trip to New Hampshire and an early fall visit (his first) to our old home in Maryland. Amidst all the other things that keep Jane and me busy, being with Jordan as he grows older, and absorbing some of his sense of play and wonder, is much of what keeps us going, and keeps us sane.

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June 19, 2025: An impressively hot day; I take the Juneteenth holiday off to be with Jane and Jordan, after recently graduating our latest class of palliative medicine fellows. Although our original plan was to camp by Tully Lake, we cancel in light of the incoming heat wave as well as afternoon thunderstorms. Instead, we take Jordan for an early morning walk through the Allandale Woods - the very first place we “hiked” with Jordan in the backpack when he was a mere five months old. Two years later, he’s running off into the forest by himself, leading us forward along the path (“Daddy, come on!”). He makes it an impressive mile (through the woods and to Allandale Farm on the other side; I jog back through the woods to move the car along) before asking for a snack and to be carried. After we explore the edge of the lily pond at Allandale Farm (showing Jordan the “turtle family” - a group of painted turtles basking on a log), we end our morning by playing at the playground in Larz Anderson Park and then getting Japanese food and ice cream in Coolidge Corner.

June 21, 2025: The summer solstice, and our rescheduled camping outing; after all, we already have all the equipment and food. I’ve booked a simple car-camp in Wompatuck State Park, a little spot in the woods with conveniently located water, bathroom, and showers just a few hundred feet away. Jordan can’t stop talking about sleeping in the forest, and it’s his first time seeing a campfire. After sundown, we tuck in, in our giant 6-person palace of a tent (plenty of room for our bags, our mats, and Jordan’s entire travel crib from home). All in all, despite a somewhat noisy environment in the campground (it’s the beginning of summer vacation - lots of families around), we get a pretty good night of sleep. Jordan and I wake before dawn (5 AM) to the sound of birds singing in the trees; we make silly faces at each other from across the tent while trying not to wake Jane.

July 4, 2025: A Fourth of July tradition at this point, we start our morning with a bit of nature and time outdoors. We head to Olmsted Park, and Jordan enjoys walking through the woods, seeing a waterfall (really a little creek run), watching the local ducks and celebrity swan family (with its brood of fuzzy little cygnets), and pretending to jog along the circular path beside Jamaica Pond. He wanders down to the pond-side and, imitating a boy nearby, pretends to fish with a tiny twig. Afterward, we stop in South Brookline for breakfast at Meetpoint Patisserie (Jordan devours half of my lox sandwich, caper fiend that he is).

July 5, 2025: A pleasant morning outing circling from Newton Highlands to Newton Centre, passing by Crystal Lake - a favorite haunt of ours in the summer and fall, for its view of the Green D Line train, as well as the beautiful clear water. Jordan watches the local canine and human swimmers, and throws pebbles by the water’s edge. Afterward, we continue to the Newton Centre Playground, followed by stops to browse and read at Newtonville Books (where Jordan’s clothes match the couch perfectly) and eat dim-sum lunch at Ding’s Kitchen next-door.

July 20, 2025: A morning out in East Boston, plane-watching with Jordan at Constitution Beach and walking Baywater Street over to Belle Isle Marsh, where we grab lobster rolls at Belle Isle Seafood.

August 3, 2025: The day after a wild three-hour timed run, a stroll from Cambridge across the Longfellow Bridge, along the Charles River Esplanade, and down a pedestrian-friendly version of Newbury Street where we have lunch and introduce Jordan to the giant Totoro at Anime Zakka.

August 17, 2025: My second 20-miler this weekend, a long pre-dawn jog along the Charles between the harbor and Watertown; getting close to ready, but the infamous wall is still looming in those last few miles. After a restful day at home (and all-you-can-eat sushi), we head out to the beach and a nearby playground in Revere, followed by an evening outing in Newton’s Picadilly Square.

August 19, 2025: A weeknight outing to Franklin Park Zoo for its Boston Lights display. Jordan enjoys the light displays and animatronic animals, and makes a wish to the Grandpa Magic Owl in the Magic Forest (“I wish for everyone to be happy!”)