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A post from the past

Posted on September 6, 2026 by jtravisthompson

3 Jan 2020

I’m sitting in the red chair tucked in the corner of the only “living room” we have at the moment. Our house has been partitioned off for the past six months as construction on our kitchen and normal living area takes place. Surprisingly we’ve adapted to the strange layout of our house. As winter continues to progress and the finish line for construction moves further into the future, we grow eager to have a functioning home again, whatever and whenever that may be.

Our cat is busy rifling thru one of the kids lunch bags. Probably because my oldest forgot to empty it upon getting home. They spent the day in art camp, something to get them out of the house while providing a brief moment of relief for their parents.

The weather today was mild with temps in the mid 50’s but it rained off and on all day. I often forget each spring and summer how many “gray” days this part of the world endures. Though I dream of distant lands like the Northlands above Auckland, my reality is here. We have lived here long enough to know and expect when spring has sprung. Still, it seems to catch me by surprise every year.

This past Christmas, despite having the means, motivation, and time to travel somewhere nice, we decided to stay home. What hung in the air but wasn’t said, this might be the last Christmas we will have with my father.

On Christmas eve, we made a short trip to visit my parents. Dad’s illness has progressed in a logarithmic pattern over the past five years. While he still recognizes who I am and proudly says my name, we haven’t had a normal conversation in over a year. During this visit, I wanted to give my mother somewhat of a break from his care, so I took the night shift during our stay. In the few months since my last visit, something has clearly changed. He walks with much difficulty. Getting him up and down the stairs is a twenty minute endeavor requiring at least two strong and able bodied care takers. It makes me worry for my mother who seems to have lost even more weight since I last saw her.

I have more or less made peace with his disease and I often harbor guilty thoughts of him passing peacefully in the night. My pragmatic and stoic side tells me that his current progression is not headed to a favorable outcome, though my heart and child emotions tell me to preserve every moment while I can. I think it will just be and one day I’ll get a call telling me what I’ve known for quite some time. This is as it probably should be, though I miss him terribly.

This past year was a very memorable one for me and my immediate family. I distinctly recall a night a few days into our summer camping trip when it all seemed to click. I recall the moment very clearly as my lovely wife and I were snuggled up under the stars in a lovely campsite called deer creek, looking up at the stars that blanketed the southern Utah skies. Our kids were asleep in the tent next to ours and all seemed at peace in the world. Most of my days are spent in my head reflecting on past actions or planning ahead for future ones. Rarely do I get the pleasure nor awareness to spend time “in the moment.” For once in my life, I think I was where I was supposed to be, surrounded by the people I needed and who needed me, doing exactly what I was supposed to do. I captured the experience in my mind as best I could. Knowing something is great while it is happening is more rare than I ever imagined. The acknowledgement of that thought rippled through my mind and has left an indelible mark on my conscience long after we departed camp.

Since then, I’ve let some stuff go. I don’t plan ahead as much. I made strides to stop dwelling on the past. I’ve tried to incorporate deliberate actions and behaviors into my life. I take notice of the daily pleasures and to treat my life as a privilege that it is. Maybe this is what happens when you reach a certain age and level of security. Maybe life is a like a rocket mid flight. At some point you’re gonna go where you’re gonna go. Best to sit back and enjoy the ride.

By any measure, I have a great life with wonderful people surrounded by a bounty of comfort and resources. I once thought you’ve made it in life when you have enough money to have Starbucks whenever you want. Lately I’ve amended that statement to say, you’ve made it in life when you can enjoy Starbucks whenever you want with a close friend.

I have a lot of things in life that I want to dedicate more time too. I want to be a better father to my sons though how one becomes a better father isn’t as straight forward as I thought. I think it means to be more present in their lives. In reality, I just hope to be a part of their world for as long as I can. I hope that they come to me for advice or to show off their accomplishments.

That’s about all I can ramble on for now. I’ve put off these types of journal entries for a very long time because I often fear the words that will transpire, or that it will become one additional habit (like running and meditation that are selfish pursuits that take time away from my family). One can be too “self helpy” and miss out on just being with your loved ones.

Post Script (September 2026) – My father lived for another year before passing in the summer of 2021.

Father’s Day 2026

Posted on June 20, 2026 by jtravisthompson

It has been a long time since my last conversation with my father. I think about him often and memories of him surface at random moments in my life. Just the other day, I was walking along the harbor in San Diego looking at the various naval vessels cruising in and out of the bay. In a flash I was overwhelmed the memory of his voice. Had he been next to me in that moment, he wouldn’t have been able to control his urge to tell me all about each ship. The name, class, year it was likely commissioned, and how many men it took to sail, etc. This coming from a man who never served in the Navy due to a faulty spine damaged by childhood polio. Nonetheless, he grew up Navy as the son of two WWII Navy veterans.

Today, I’m a father with sons of my own. Oddly, I do not identify nor think of myself much as a father. Yet my time, commitments, and life revolve around my family and especially my boys. At the moment, we are together as a family, camped out of a hotel, on a three day trip for their sport. Many fathers I assume can relate, hours spent in some random Fairfield Inn room filled with laundry and leftover takeout containers. All of this for the baseball, soccer, basketball, or whatever tournament where other parents get to experience the ups and downs of their children’s athletic endeavors.

My dad never got to know my sons. I often wondered what he would think of their character and my efforts to parent them. I bet he would laugh at some of my tactics that were clearly passed on from his own unique style of parenting. Growing up, if my sisters or I ever did something that he did not approve of, he rarely became angry. Instead he often would launch into some story about our “older” siblings who “committed that act” and were never seen or heard from again. Though I’ve been tempted to guilt and create the same fear in my own kids, I lacked his stern poker face when telling outright lies.

My closeness with my dad had ups and downs like any paternal relationship. We were two males confined to a household dominated by intelligent, cunning, yet often unstable women. On many occasions, we would find each other wandering outside the house or hiding in the garage wondering when it might be safe to go back in. We also spent a lot of time together in the car traveling to and from various commutes that defined life in our rural area. I tolerated his music which tended to be the happy go lucky Motown and rock-a-billy stuff that grew tiresome after two songs. As a child in the 80’s, one can only take so many Beach Boys songs. As I grew older I found the courage to get him to move the dial away from the oldies to sports talk radio or on special occasion, classic rock.

Before long, I became a young adult and left for college. Our relationship matured and he would make the six hour drive every few months to visit. He’d buy me a nice dinner and we would spend the weekend at a baseball game or catch a movie at the local AMC. I worked for him in the summers and we managed to make time for one another when other sons might have chosen to avoid their fathers. Though we had each other’s phone numbers, i don’t recall many conversations in that medium, our talks were reserved for in person. These long form conversations often accompanied various “projects” like yard work or some home improvement job. I do not know what other sons talked to their fathers about, but dad and me chatted about life, relationships, work, philosophy, and the simple pleasures in life.

I distinctly remember the last time I we spent a “moment” like this together. I had picked him up from something in town and had planned to drive him back to his house. At the time my mother was very ill, and my sisters and I were together load managing the crisis. I was responsible for dad that day. I helped him into my car and I put on some music that reminded me of him. “California Dreaming” came on and he started to softly sing along, something he did often while driving. By now, my father was years into his dementia and we hadn’t had a real conversation in a very long time. I held his hand and we took the long way home with the windows down. I didn’t change the station.

I love my sons. I wonder if they think of me as much as I think of my dad. I hope someday we develop a similar bond and go on walks or do “projects” together while talking about life. I hope that I get to meet their spouses, sons and daughters. I hope that one day, a song comes on and they think of me.

Happy Father’s day dad, I miss you.

Characters I have Known – David Schneider

Posted on April 22, 2026 by jtravisthompson

In Macolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, he developed categories of individuals by their role in helping ideas spread throughout societies. For example, “mavens” were passionate about gathering knowledge, researching, and staying in the know about products, prices, and trends. Mavens are the people in your life you go to for advice about optimizing Amex points or whether the Toyota RAV4 is a better value than the Honda CRV. Gladwell’s most memorable group were the people he called “connectors”. They were individuals who had an amazing ability to quickly connect and remain networked with thousands of people. The average human tends to keep their network between 200-400 individuals (which may have evolutionary social norms going back to our tribal ancestry). Connectors are very rare, maybe less than 0.1% of society, but everyone knows at least one connector. David Schneider was my first connector.

He knew someone, somehow, everywhere he went. Literally everywhere. It was a super power.

I recall one time when we were waiting for a flight home from a ski trip in Colorado. I don’t recall the airport, but it was one of those tiny ones that only has one or two gates and you have to climb stairs outside to board the plane. We were a part of a small group including my family, looking to spend a week in the mountains. This tiny airport could only hold maybe 100 people, most of which were families like us. Though the place only had one security agent, it did have a bar staffed with three people. David, true to form, walked up to the bartender and gave him a big hug. They knew each other from some event in Atlanta from years ago. Ten minutes later, David looked across the waiting area and saw another couple he knew from his college days. By the time our flight took off 45 minutes later, David could name nearly every one of the people in that terminal from that afternoon.

David came into my life roughly the same time I entered adolescence. As a late 20-something, he moved back to Kentucky after several years as a journeyman carpenter in Atlanta. Like all of his adventures, a friend of a friend of a friend put him in contact with my mom. She hired him on the spot. At the time, she was a few years into building her own business specializing in high end antique English furniture. She had developed a reputation for hiring smart twenty-somethings who needed work. Drawn to their energy, intelligence and optimism, I think they made her feel younger. If you were an able bodied young adult not sure what to do with your french literature degree, call my mom. She will put you to work.

I too spent a lot of time at the antique shop. Despite family ties to senior leadership, I was at the bottom of the hierarchy. I was the peon or domestique to the elder gen x’ers who seemingly ran the place. I helped move furniture, wax tables, polish brass, pack the truck, unpack the truck, stack books, and all the other endless chores.

In addition to my career as a furniture mover, I was a also competitive swimmer on a club team. During the summer, we practiced ten times a week. I did not have a drivers license. In this world, it meant my mom used her employees to chauffeur me to practice. They used me for for manual labor, especially the jobs they did not enjoy doing. Somehow it all worked out. Regardless, I spent a lot of time with young adults who were maybe ten years removed from adolescence themselves.

This is how I got to know David. We spent most of those hours on US-27 in his black F150 XLT extended cab long bed truck commuting back and forth between Danville and Lexington.

David could talk. David had stories. David liked the sound of his own voice.

He was a very fun person to be around. He was both confident and laid back. He had a style all his own. Something like a cross between Matthew McConaughey and Mel Gibson, complete with the early 90’s mullet, Levi 501s and cowboy boots.

To David’s credit, he never complained about having to shuttle me around when my mom told him to drop what he was doing to drive me to practice. In fact, I think he saw me as a little brother and was eager to both enlighten and corrupt my teenage brain.

We often talked for hours about everything from music, cars, school, cities, travel, and food. Most of all we talked about girls. As a teenager in the pre internet era, I knew very little about dating and or the opposite sex. David found that both amusing and endearing. With a straight face, he would answer any question I put forth. Then he would launch into a story from his own life. For me, an introvert and awkward teen, this was a huge step forward in my growth and development. Looking back, I still remember how he was the first adult to listen to me at that stage in my life. Few emotions in life make you feel more important than the undivided attention from someone you admire.

Before meeting David, I largely followed the music and other style trends of my fellow middle schoolers. They probably picked up those trends from MTV or older siblings, who also probably picked up those trends from MTV. Our uniform consisted of Guess jeans cuffs rolled paired with a Varnet tee-shirt and oversized flannel shirt tied at the waist. I listened to the early hip hop groups like Digital Underground, Run DMC, NWA, Ghetto Boys, Too Short, etc. There wasn’t much variety, and most of us just wanted more than anything to fit in. For most middle schoolers, conformity was the rule, not curiosity and exploring. David disrupted that for me.

First of all, he took every car ride as a personal challenge to expose me to new music. His music. Aside from his truck and two yellow labs, his most prized possession was his CD collection. He loved music, all kinds of music, but mostly bands like REM, U2, and the Pogues. He was also a die hard dead head. He spent his summers during college following the Grateful Dead across the country. Hello New Potato Caboose. In the many hours we rode together, I don’t think he ever played the same CD twice, except maybe Joshua Tree. Note, He had a Sony Discman on his console that had a cassette converter with a wire that ran to the headphone jack in his discman so we could listen thru the truck speakers. Through David, I learned about many new bands from the 80’s. We would do entire weeks of just the same artist going through each album end to end. It didn’t matter if I liked the song or not, we listened to everything, no skipping songs.

He loved live concerts. I think it combined his favorite things, music, people, and girls. We went to see Mellencamp once at Riverbend in Cincinnati. While it wasn’t my first concert, it was my first one with an adult who wasn’t related to me. True to form, within minutes of walking into the venue, David ran into several folks he remembered from some party in Atlanta years ago. They invited us to join them on the lawn and a new concert experience opened up for me, sharing good times with strangers. But to David, no one was a stranger. He wanted to know everyone. He never forgot a face. He never stopped going out and meeting people. Thus his network kept growing and growing.

Charisma comes in many forms, but I never met anyone who was so friendly, engaging, and unafraid of new people. He was approachable as a Labrador Retriever puppy. After an hour into the show, he had made maybe 50 new friends. Yet despite his growing entourage, he didn’t ignore or forget me. Somehow despite him being the center of every story and crowd, I was never pushed out or left alone. He nudged me to shake hands, swap names, and share stories. To him it came naturally.

David did not stay long in my life. The same winds that brought him to my town carried him out a few years later. By then, I had progressed from a meager adolescent to a late teenager preparing for college life. At the time, I was unaware of his influence. As one comes of age, your behaviors and mind are like a sponge absorbing from the people you orbit, often not acknowledging the source. As I look back many years later, I am grateful for David’s brief tenure in my life. As an introvert, I could never match his gift of casualness with strangers. Yet, I followed his lead in being fearless in new situations. As a result, the world for me is much friendlier and bigger as a result.

I don’t recall the last time I saw David in person. I think it was at a late night party when he was visiting town. I was still in high school and likely out past my curfew. He made a point to catch up with my evolving music tastes (I was on a Pink Floyd kick at the time). He also asked about my dating life and what colleges I was interested in. Sometime afterwards I heard he moved back to his hometown, Louisville, where he married and settled down.

Maybe ten years since I last saw him, word got back to me that he had passed away at the age of 43 from an aggressive form of cancer. His obituary said many attended his funeral to celebrate the life of the unofficial mayor of St. Matthews. I imagine the crowd was enormous.

I always think of him when I hear “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”