First interview for "Nowhere to lay my head"

Morning Line hosts Larry Dowdy and Janet Rose on WLNI here in Lynchburg had me in studio as a guest yesterday (4/18)

Here is the interview:

Interview on WLNI for "Nowhere to lay my Head"

Why I don't go to church on Easter Weekend...

I'm uncharacteristically quiet on Easter weekend. Starting Maundy Thursday I get very introspective and I internalize the events, mostly in silence. I appreciate that others post things about the cross and the empty tomb, but somehow for me...I can't. I went to a small Christian High School and we had a Good Friday service each year, and seven "Preacher Boys" would deliver a short, 5 minute sermon, each of us taking one of the final words of Christ. As an adult, I got in the habit of going to the Good Friday service at the church I attended, more out of habit, and maybe some guilt if I thought about doing anything else.
As I grew older and became a little more of a contemplative, I gravitated toward isolation on Easter weekend, especially Good Friday. It became more necessary for me to be by myself in order to stop the sounds of the world intruding on my desire to gaze at the viciousness of the cross, unobstructed, and remember what Jesus did for me. But I'd go to the Good Friday services at whatever church I was attending at that stage of my life because I still felt obligated. I stopped several years ago after the pastor of the church I attended at the time decided that the best day of the entire year to collect a gigantic, one-time offering for a new building project was the day Jesus was slaughtered on a cross. The entire service turned into a horrible (for me at least) attempt at solemnifying this vision for a new addition, and the emotionally burdensome twisting of the Crucifixion in order to squeeze the bucks from the faithful. ( "In light of Jesus' ultimate sacrifice on the Cross, we'll honor that by sacrificing for a beautiful new wing so we can spread the Gospel...")
After that day, I promised to never step foot in a church on Good Friday again. That is NOT to say that any other churches do things like this, or that it's wrong to have a Good Friday service at all. I just decided that for me...I'm going to listen to my heart on this and go it alone. For a while, I'd take communion by myself. But as years rolled on and I contemplated the Last Supper and the Cross more and more, I couldn't bring myself to break bread in remembrance. Not on that day.
Easter Sunday is the same for me. Let me repeat there is NOTHING wrong with Easter services. I just find that for me, personally, everything I'm supposed to be thinking about and celebrating gets lost in the mass of humanity. Easter Sunday is really like New Years Day for believers. I remember that He is risen. His new life means I have new life. Today it begins once again. I won't be in church on Sunday. Not because I think it's wrong. I love my church and my pastor. But I find that as each year rolls by, I connect less and less to the real significance of this weekend. Christmas and Easter are our center, as Christians. Without these two events, we have nothing. Routine has sapped the meaning from them and as a Believer, if I don't have that...I have lost my way.
That's why I don't post "He is Risen" memes or go to church on Good Friday. I am REALLY glad others do. I didn't write this to chastise or question anyone. I guess I wrote it in case any of you have a contemplative in your life and can't figure out why they don't get as demonstrative at the holiday as you do. I suppose I also wrote it to challenge us all to make sure we're considering what it is we're remembering.God bless. Happy Easter. He is risen!

Thoughts on Maundy Thursday and the human side of Jesus...

 "Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos"
          ("A new commandment I give unto you, That you love one another; as I have loved you")

This is the Latin phrase from which we get "Maundy Thursday". It fits the day perfectly. Jesus gives us this command in action first, later He gives it in word. This day began with a series of teachings, and the sun set on a final dinner with his closest friends, in a borrowed banquet room.
     At that dinner, He would be misunderstood by his friends, yet again, asked for favoritism, and each man would proclaim his undying loyalty despite what Jesus said. Then He would send His betrayer on his way and turn his disciples tables upside down, once more, by taking on a servant's job and washing their feet. When this was over He would ask a handful of them to stay on with Him through the night, and pray for Him while He wrestled with His Fathers' will.
     His friends would fail him and sleep their way through the hour of His greatest need. He would wrestle alone, crying out not once but three times, and with enough overwhelming urgency that he would break his capillaries, and blood would mingle with His sweat. He would ask three times for His Father to change His plans and make a different way other than the cup of suffering He was being asked to drink. Three times His Father would say "No", choosing instead to strengthen His beloved Son with enough Grace for the task at hand.
     His wrestling and pleading finished, He would go and awaken his sleeping friends and the chill of the night would be interrupted by the glow of torches, and the rumble of soldiers, and the icy betrayal of the kiss of a friend. His friends would scatter, and the one who remained within sight, would curse himself and use profanity in an effort to prove he wasn't a follower. Then the rooster would crow...and it would be Friday.

     Jesus was facing His impending death. He knew this by now. He knew how bad it would be to take on the sin of the world. He knew that it meant separation from his Father. He knew it meant a battle for the souls of men even though He knew there was a broken, sinful nature in those souls. He chose to come here, chose to live here, and chose to die here, for us. 
     In those last hours, I wonder what went through his mind. Did he write a letter to Mary and tell her he loved her? Did he find himself caught up in reminiscences of happy times in his childhood? Did He draw a deep breath and smell the salt spray of the ocean that last night in Bethany? Did he spend any special, individual time with his friends...time we don't know about...chatting and remembering? Did he choke on his words at any point? Was he emotional at all? When he performed the breaking of the bread, the very liturgy we now use to celebrate His death, did it make him wince just a little? For us it is symbolism, for Him, at that moment, it was about to happen for real. 
     Did He wonder how God was going to pull this little band together after He was gone? I know he trusted His father to do it, and take care of them, but did He wonder to Himself..."I don't know how, Father...they still don't seem to get it." Did He commend his few personal effects to one of his friends, maybe telling them to sell them and give the money to his mother? When he dipped the bread into the bowl and declared Judas the traitor, did his hand touch Judas' for an instant, and did it break his heart? When he told Judas, "What you do...do quickly..." was there breaking in his voice? Most of us have been betrayed by a friend at one time or other. Few have known full well it was coming. Jesus was a man, after all. The Total man. How would I have handled this? Thank God we never have to find out.

Letting God lead. The journals of a (formerly) homeless dad

[ In 16 days, on April 18, my new book will be released. It is entitled; "Nowhere To Lay My Head: The True Story of a Homeless Dad" and it chronicles the six years I spent homeless while I remained in my daughter's life. It was by far the hardest thing I've ever written and, I hope, the most helpful. I learned a lot of lessons during that time. For the next two weeks I hope to share some of them as a lead-up to the book launch.]

At the time the great Christian artist Rich Mullins left us in September of 1997, he was working on a new album. It was still in rough demo form, and would become “The Jesus Record” after his death. The album was discovered on a cassette in his belongings and his friends and bandmates in The Ragamuffin Band produced it and released it three years after his death.

It was haunting. There were songs that were very much like what Rich had been writing previously and there were songs that sounded very different. Some were even “other-worldly,” addressing the topics of death and leaving friends behind. It was as if Rich knew his accident was coming and wanted his friends to be ready and to have hope.

He also addressed the topics of loss and failure; both were experiences Rich had been intimately familiar with. Rich had loved and lost. He had battled demons and failed sometimes. He was lonely, even in the midst of his great successes and even though he had deep friendships. He was lonely because he was keenly aware that he didn’t belong here.

In 2002, on the fifth anniversary of his passing, his friends gathered in Nashville to host a memorial concert. It was a wonderful night and in between songs, they regaled us with their favorite stories of Rich and his quirky, crazy ways. They spoke of his kindness and his moodiness. His love and his passion, (they are two different things sometimes.) The great Phil Keaggy said something about halfway through the night and it has stayed with me to this day. He said, (I am paraphrasing because I never wrote it down that night) “Rich was truly the most ‘one-foot-on-earth-and –one-foot-in-Heaven person I ever met. He truly was a sojourner here. I don’t think he ever felt like he belonged here, and so he never felt entirely at ease with what this world offers.”

I think this was why Rich could write so honestly. Because he was unfettered by caring very much what people thought about the content. He was a perfectionist with his music, as his friends have told me. He wanted commercial success as any artist would, but he never wanted to alter his art for the sake of that success. The funny thing is, it was that success that gave him the freedom to not care about that success. Because he had produced “hits” for the label, the label let him do things as he wanted to do them.

On “The Jesus Record” there is a marvelous song called “Hard to Get.” To listen to it in full view of Rich’s death, is to feel the chill of wondering if he knew somehow that a fatal car crash was coming. If you loved Rich’s music you can’t help but weep when he sings what seems to be a goodbye and a message to his friends to remember him and that he isn’t far away…just hard to get to. The song is about Jesus, of course, but it’s also about everyone we ever loved who went on before us.

There is a verse toward the end that says this:

And I know You bore our sorrows

And I know You feel our pain

And I know it would not hurt any less

Even if it could be explained

And I know that I am only lashing out

At the One who loves me most

And after I figured this, somehow

All I really need to know

Is if You who live in eternity

Hear the prayers of those of us who live in time

We can't see what's ahead

And we cannot get free of what we've left behind

I'm reeling from these voices that keep screaming in my ears

All the words of shame and doubt, blame and regret

I can't see how You're leading me unless You've led me here

Where I'm lost enough to let myself be led

And so You've been here all along I guess

It's just Your ways and You are just plain hard to get

I seldom listen to this song without getting tears in my eyes. Sometimes I sob. I’ve lived this. Especially in the last ten years. In 2007, the industry I worked in began its death spiral. I lost my home that year. I rebounded enough to rent a house and –as did all the others in that field- kept vigil to see if this hiccup was a death rattle. By 2008, we realized it was. By March of 2008, the company I worked for was gone, and by June the industry itself was literally on life support. Over 800,000 people lost their jobs in that industry. 

I began a six year journey of homelessness, because my daughter was in jeopardy at her mother’s house (we had divorced eight years earlier and her new husband was horribly abusive) and I was the only buffer. I made a choice and I paid a high price for it. I did it willingly and I would not have made a different decision because before I am anything else I am her dad.

I endured this hellish existence until May 2014, when we moved here to Virginia and I was hired by my alma mater. The homelessness is over but the memories linger. They haunt me. The good and the bad. The memories before the fall…of my home and our pets and the life I had with my little girl. The memories of the cold nights and the desperation, and the despair. The endless job search, the menial tasks just for gas money, the embarrassment of trying to eat enough food samples at Sam’s Club to make a meal. The shame of being homeless.

I’m reeling from these voices. There are times when I cannot get free from what I’ve left behind. It hurts. I missed six years of normalcy with my daughter. I never missed her important events like recitals and birthdays. I saw her almost daily. But we didn’t have a home back then. She couldn’t come and spend the night like she did before. She needed her daddy to recuse her and I couldn’t. I hear those voices sometimes. I see the things I lost and watch as they burn to cinders before my eyes.

When I was enduring this terrible ordeal, there were so many times when I questioned God’s wisdom. His plan. Was this His plan, or was I somehow relegated to this whole thing on my own? Was He simply watching from some celestial living room, eating popcorn and waiting to see how I’d handle this whole thing? Of course, that’s not the case, but it felt like that sometimes. It felt like He was letting me wander. The truth is that all along He was leading me.

And He has led me here now. Here to the foothills of the Blue Ridge, and to a job with my alma mater, and with my daughter here as a now-sophomore music major. He led me to a place where I was finally lost enough to let myself be led. To let Him take over. To stop fighting Him about what I want, and to accept what He has that I need.

In 16 days, the story of this long journey will be released to the world. I don’t know if it will be loved or hated, embraced or rejected, a blessing or a curse. I do hope it helps someone. I do hope it brings hope to others who are stuck in their own desert, wandering aimlessly, looking for a way out.

I especially hope that it marks and end to this longing and puts these voices to silence once and for all. I hope that talking about it and getting input from others will finally shut down this echo chamber of remorse and regret and shame. It still hurts sometimes when I say, “I used to be homeless.” It is still embarrassing. I still wrestle with forgiveness toward those who ignored my plight. I still fear homelessness sometimes.

I have to let that go. I have to let myself live here, where I am now. Not in the back of a Yukon parked on a farm in Franklin, TN.

We all have something, or many things, that keep calling to us from the past. Mistakes, bad choices, character lapses, just plain foolish actions. We’re human. We have to address them and then let them go. We have to step back and realize that He used even these, even our frail humanity, to lead us to where we are right now; lost enough to let Him take over and lead us.

It’s here where we discover that we were all really homeless…and He is leading us home.

A Dad Never Quits

My new book comes out next month.

It was the hardest thing I have ever written and chronicles the six hardest years I have lived so far. I wrote the book from late September until about New Year’s Day. I explored six years of the loneliest, darkest, most broken, desert walk of my life in a four-month period. That time frame made it even tougher. I didn’t have time to decompress from particularly hard chapters, or emotional memories. I didn’t have a deadline on this book, but once I “hit the vein”; I seldom paused for very long.

I don’t sleep a lot, as a rule, so I was up early every morning, writing a few thousand words before work. I would come home from work and write until I was exhausted at night. I don’t mean to diminish childbirth, and what a woman endures, but I feel like I gave birth to this book. I feel like the writing process was uncomfortable, long, arduous, and demanding. It’s never been that way for me before. Every book I’ve ever written has flowed freely and left me happy as I wrote it. This book left me weary.

Six years was hard. Six years without a bed, without a kitchen, or a shower of my own, or my garden. At the start of those six years, I lost the two beautiful Springer Spaniels we had owned. We lost our loving cat, Giacomo. I lost the refuge my daughter would come to need as her world exploded at her mom’s house and she desperately needed to escape the torment of her mother’s husband. While I was trapped in that car, she was trapped in her own nightmare.

I cried myself to sleep more times than I can recall, or care to. I dealt with anger, betrayal, disappointment, shame, loneliness, isolation, fear, and doubt. I second-guessed myself every day. “Was I doing the right thing by staying?” “Was I looking in the right places for a job?” “Was anyone ever going to hire me?” “Was my daughter going to be okay?” “Is she going to give up hope one day, run away, turn to drugs or alcohol, or become so despondent that she ends her life?”

I asked God all of these torturous questions every time they entered my heart. Sometimes I got immediate answers, most times, I did not. Most of the time, I only felt His presence and somehow managed to trust that it would be enough, and that He would work His plan in all this. As a dad, that was barely good enough for me, but not for my daughter. I am her daddy. I needed to give her something concrete and I needed to be her protector. I could not be. Not as I wanted to be and certainly not as she needed me to be. She needed me to get her out of that house, and I kept having to take her back to it. On the nights when it got too unbearable, she would call me in tears, begging me to come and get her. I always did. We would spend a few hours together, but since I had no home, I always had to take her back to that dread. I cannot tell you how that made me feel. Not with all the words I know.

There were many times when I thought it might be best for me to just leave. I could go to Texas, or to North Dakota,…some of the very few places that had jobs back then. I could make money. I could rebuild my life, and then I could come and get her out of there.

I would think of this and always reject the idea out of hand. I know my daughter. No matter what I told her, she would see this as a rejection and an abandonment. Her mother’s husband would have seen it as the end of the protection that my presence in her life offered, and his behavior would have doubtless grown even more violent and abominable. I might have been broke, homeless, and without prospects, but I was still a big, tough, old-school Italian guy from Philadelphia, who would not hesitate to hospitalize this jerk if he went too far. He came close many times, and only the grace of God that kept me from kicking his front door in and stomping him right into a coma. But had I done that, I’d be in jail and she’d be at his mercy.

I could not leave. I mean, I could have, it was always possible. But leaving would have jeopardized my daughter and I could never do that.

When I began writing this book, I had the working title: “A Dad Never Quits”. My friend “K” called me one day, after I had sent her a rough draft. She had a real problem with the title. For her it was personal and I knew why. She had been through a terrible divorce not long after I had endured mine. She has two young daughters and her ex-husband did not live up to his fatherhood, after the divorce. (I’m being kind here) She was serious –as she can be when it hits a nerve with her- and she said, “Craig…not all dads stick it out. A lot of dads quit.” In hindsight, she was taking the title of the book as a literal statement. I explained to her that to me, if a man quits on his family he is not a dad anyway. A real dad will do whatever it takes, regardless of the cost to him. At first, I wasn’t going to change the title. I even released a short, two-chapter galley version with that title. However, as I wrote more, and as the emotions churned, I saw some of her wisdom on this, and I changed the title. This made me sad. Sad because lots of dads do quit. Sad because my own dad quit, before I was even born. I’ve met him once. He and my mother never married. He wants no relationship. I tried to convince him otherwise for a few years but eventually I grew weary of begging for something that no one should ever have to beg for, and I accepted it for what it was. I was twenty-one before I even knew about him, so it’s not like there was a hole. But there was.

A child is born with a dad-shaped vacuum. It’s similar to the “God-shaped vacuum” found within Pascal’s writings. A child needs to have his or her dad around. It’s not popular to say these days. Feminists have emasculated society until men are viewed as unnecessary. But don’t kid yourself. I work at a major University. I see the long-term effects of this dad-vacuum. The lack of manliness among men of this generation is disturbing. It’s not specific to this campus. It’s generational. We’ve had two or three generations now where the dads have vanished, or at least where they’ve been so neutered that they might as well have vanished. It’s bad enough that my friend Rick Burgess had to write a book called “How to Be a Man.” It’s a great book and it makes me wish I had a son so I could employ the things he teaches. Rick is a real man. Real in the godly, biblical sense. He surveyed the landscape and saw the terrible lack of real, manly, strong, unbending, determined men. ( I recommend Rick’s book whole-heartedly.)

I kicked all this around as I thought about my friend’s words to me. I heard the pain in her voice as she reminded me that not all dads refuse to quit. I’ve seen the after-effects in her life. I’ve seen it in lots of kids lives. My daughter has so many friends whose fathers have abandoned them. I don’t know if she ever told her friends that her dad was homeless…I doubt she would volunteer that, but I do know that her friends always seemed to like the fact that at least one of their friends had a real dad, who was really involved in his daughter’s life.

It’s sad to think that men give up on their families. Sad to think that a man would put himself above his own children and go off chasing his own desires. I couldn’t I stayed.

I stayed and endured whatever hell and mankind threw at me because I simply love my daughter. I couldn’t even fathom doing something else.

There are many lessons in this new book. There was a light in all that darkness and I hope it shines bright enough as I tell the story. Hope did spring out of hopelessness. Faith did get me through. God was good in all that darkness. I didn’t intend it to be a fatherhood book. This book was about my fatherhood, and how that kept me in a place that nobody would want to be. But as it turns out, there is a fatherhood lesson. Sadly, there is a subtle challenge within the pages. A challenge not to quit. A challenge to do the hard thing because it’s the right thing.

If a man reads of my hardships and decides that he has no excuse for quitting on his family, then my ordeal was worth it, I guess. I didn’t write the book for that reason, but I’ll accept that as a tertiary product of the six years I endured.

Let’s get back to the times when it’s not a stretch to say “A dad never quits’”

Life After Homelessness...

I’m 53.

I’ve been a dad for almost nineteen years. Six of those years I spent homeless. Those years are the ones that hurt me the most right now. I think about them far too much. I think about how my daughter’s life might have turned out if I hadn’t lost my career and then my house. I think about how much happier she’d be. How much safer she would have been, away from her mother’s second (now second ex) husband. Happier to have grown up where she was born, and remained there, and gone to a regular high school and, had a dad with a respectable job who made a good living.

Instead she was trapped at her mom’s house while I lived in a Yukon and struggled to remain alive, and in her life.

I missed far too many moments. But I haven’t missed them entirely. I keep seeing them in my heart. They won’t go away. I can’t forgive myself for being homeless. I still see myself in that Yukon, sleeping on that foam roll. It still hurts.

It’s infusing itself into everything I do these days. Maybe writing a book about it wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe I shouldn’t have dredged it up again. But I did.

Now I can’t escape it. I can’t stop wondering “what if?” I can’t stop thinking about how my bed used to feel, how my house smelled, how my coffee tasted when I drank it looking out the window at five acres of the Tennessee countryside.

I can’t stop thinking about my daughter when she was my little girl…not an almost-nineteen-year-old woman who needs me less and less and has dreams of her own that she is struggling to get off the ground.

I’ve never been a “Who am I?” type of guy. But now I am. I’m not confidant in my role in life. I wonder what it is I’m really here for. To be good at my job? I’ve always been good at whatever job I’ve held, dating back to cutting the neighbor’s grass for five bucks a week. Good at being a dad? I was great at that until she was ten and I became homeless. I was as good as I could be after that. By the time we got here to Lynchburg she was sixteen and I was dealing with an adult. I feel like I’ve failed her. I feel like I failed me.

For the first time in my life, I am truly afraid.

Even when I was homeless, somehow I had faith that it was going to work out eventually. I was frustrated, angry, sometimes bitter, weary, hopeless at times…but never afraid. Not for long anyway.

But I am now.

I’m afraid of ending up there again. I’m afraid of failing my daughter somehow. I’m afraid of growing old alone, and afraid of growing old with the wrong person and ending up divorced again. I’m afraid of failure. Petrified of failure.

I check my work emails at night, even though I know there won’t be anything there that I need to address before work the next day. I read emails I’ve sent; afraid I’ll catch a mistake. I look at my calendar afraid I’ll forget a meeting or that I forgot to set one. I re-think conversations and wish I had chosen different words. Every Thursday we’re tasked with emailing a few accomplishments for the week. On Wednesday night I worry myself sick wondering if anything I accomplished is actually an “accomplishment.” I have lately taken to analyzing myself into oblivion. Because I’m afraid.

I’m afraid that I’m old and I’m the only one who doesn’t realize it. I’m afraid I’ll become that old guy who doesn’t get it, he doesn’t understand that he’s become old and all the younger people smile politely but snicker when he walks past, because he’s an entire generation remove from relevance.

I’m afraid that the tail end of my “best years” were spent homeless instead of being great at my job as I once was. I’m afraid my daughter is permanently scarred from all she’s lived through.

Rich Mullins wrote a song right before he died. It’s called “Hard to get.” There is a line within the song that goes like this:

“I’m reeling from these voices that keep ringing in my ears,

All the words of shame and doubt, blame and regret.”

I’m reeling. The voices won’t stop ringing in my ears. The voice of my daughter calling me “Daddy” (which she no longer calls me. Now it’s “Dad”) and asking me to push her on the swing just a few minutes more. Or her delight watching our litter of pups being born. I hear her voice on the phone on those horrible nights when she would call me and beg me to come rescue her from her mom’s house and I couldn’t do a darned thing, because I was homeless. How betrayed did that make her feel?  When will I forgive myself for that?

It’s been three years since I was homeless but I’m still -in many ways- trapped in that Yukon. And I’m afraid that’s where I’ll remain. At least in my heart.

And I hate being afraid…

I LIVE Right Here...

* I have another blog called "Just One More Shift" which chronicles my somewhat insane journey to play men's hockey this fall for Liberty's D3 team. I wrote this piece on that site a few days ago. It's really worth sharing here. Enjoy.

I spent six years living in my car.

Most of you know this, many of you do not. The more people this blog reaches, the more it might need to be explained. You can always find my story by googling me. I won't go into it here, in depth. The thumbnail is: I was in the mortgage business for ten years. 2008 happened. I lost my entire career and my home. I had to stay in Nashville because my daughter's world was falling apart at her mom's house. (We had been divorced for many years prior to 2008) I couldn't find work there so I slept in my car.

There is a whole lot more. A full book's worth in fact. But this isn't the place for that.

I'm only giving the story as a backdrop. When asked "Where do you live?" it was hard to answer. Sadly, looking back on it, the answer at that time was; "Nowhere." I don't mean I had no place to live. That was true on the surface. But this morning I was thinking about this journey I'm on to play college hockey again at 53. The thought came to me; "You live wherever you are at the time." I'll say it again: "You live wherever you are at the time." The emphasis changes everything. There are people who have beautiful, expensive, expansive houses and they aren't living at all. There are people who might sleep in the back of a Yukon SUV, as I did, and yet they are so alive and so full of life that one might think they have the life of a celebrity.

That's what's at the essence of this blog and this daunting task I have undertaken. I want to live.

I learned the hard way, during those six incredibly hard years, that living, and being alive are two different things. When people ask me where I live now, I answer, "Right here...right where I am." I want to live! I want people to look at my life and see something God did that seemed like it was horrible and painful and terrible and see something good coming out of it. It was all those things. It was horrible and painful and terrible. On the surface, so is childbirth, but the end result is something wonderful: Life.

I'm not attempting this hockey thing for some short range glory or to just gain some sort of fleeting fame. Being the oldest college hockey player in history will certainly lend that on it's own. However, that's not my motivation. I am doing this to live. To look around at the landscape of this place where God moved me three years ago and say; "Okay, what do I have in front of me right now? What am I going to do with that?" That, my friends, is being alive! I work for my alma mater. One of the benefits I get is free tuition for one degree at each level. I have my Bachelor's degree already, so the next step is a Master's degree. I decided a few months ago to pursue my Master's in Communications. It's a natural fit for me. One of the benefits of that is I will be considered a full-time student again. That means, since I only played two seasons, I have eligibility remaining. The opportunity is there. Living means I take advantage of it. I could spend my days getting that degree and not try out for the team. There'd be no shame in that. But in my heart, I want to play one more time. I long to be a part of a team again. I want to smell the rink and feel the excitement of an odd-man rush, and hear the sound of blades cutting through ice.

I don't just want to live here, I want to live. Here.

It's not just hockey. It's life. I have a beautiful guitar sitting in my closet. I enjoy playing. But I haven't taken it out of it's case in two years. I've been too busy. Too busy trying to earn a living.

Is that living, or just being alive? I haven't written nearly enough. I haven't told my story and motivated people. I haven't fly-fished the Tye River and I've been here three years.

I want to play next fall because it's an option. I want to play because it's possible. It's not likely, but it's possible. I used to think that people who said they climbed a mountain "Because it was there..." were out-of-touch hippies. Lot's of things are "there" but we don't necessarily engage them. I get it now, though.

Sir Edmund Hillary failed several times in his attempts to be the first man to climb Everest. One time in particular inspires me. He had lost several of his party in his latest attempt and was called to appear before Parliament to give an update on his progress. He stood before that august group, with a giant map of Everest behind him. He rose to the podium, turned and looked at the map, shook his fist at it and said these words: "You won...this time. But you're a mountain, and I am a man. You're as big as you're ever going to get. But I am still growing!"

That's why you climb a mountain. Or attempt your first marathon at age seventy. Or determine to run at least one mile, every single day for the rest of your life, as my friend Terry Lancaster has, and radically changed his life.

It's why a 53 year old man decides he has one more year of college hockey in him. Because every day when he goes to work, he sees the nicest hockey rink in the entire ACHA and he knows there is a team he might be able to make, and to not try is to not live.

That team is there already. It's not going anywhere. But I might be able to grow enough to reach that summit, and pull on an LU sweater one more time, and plant my flag on that patch of real estate where I am living at the moment.

When people ask me, this time next year, "So where do you live?" I want to be sure that I'm being honest when I say: "Right here. I live, right here."

Here we go!