The Promise | Adventures

Two coffee cups on a worn wooden kitchen table in early morning light. — Before Any Of It The kitchen table where this got written. Two cups on it, which was always the idea.

Before Any Of It The kitchen table where this got written. Two cups on it, which was always the idea.

I am forty-one, and I have never been clearer about what I want to do with the rest of it.

What follows is eleven chapters. Eleven things I intend to build, and nearly all of them take decades, which is exactly why I want my hands on them now rather than at fifty.

I have wanted most of this for years. What changed is that I stopped thinking of it as somewhere I would eventually drift toward, and started treating it as a plan with a first move and a next one after that. So here it is, written down somewhere I can be held to it.

An open notebook covered in handwriting on a desk, beside a fountain pen, a brass lamp and a stack of books. — Setting It Down The desk where this stopped being a vague intention and became a plan with a first move.

Setting It Down The desk where this stopped being a vague intention and became a plan with a first move.

One rule for the whole book. Every chapter says where it honestly stands today, the parts already running and the parts still sitting at zero. I want the scoreboard visible, because an intention nobody ever checks is just a nice feeling I had once.

Some of it is moving already. The rest I am impatient to start.

There is one more thing, and it belongs here on the first page, not buried somewhere in the middle.

A sink of dishes and a dish towel in ordinary evening kitchen light. — The Tuesday Nobody Writes About A sink at the end of an ordinary day. Most of a life looks like this, and I want to be good at it.

The Tuesday Nobody Writes About A sink at the end of an ordinary day. Most of a life looks like this, and I want to be good at it.

I want to do all of it with someone.

I have not met her yet. So everything I am about to write about her is a promise made in advance, to a woman whose name I do not know, and I am setting it down now precisely because this is easy to mean in the abstract and hard to hold to on an ordinary Wednesday in year nine.

Here is what I owe her.

Two pairs of hands resting on a kitchen table, one reaching toward the other. — Still Here In The Morning Hands still on the table in the morning, after a night that did not go well.

Still Here In The Morning Hands still on the table in the morning, after a night that did not go well.

Most of these sixty years will be ordinary days, and I have come around to thinking the ordinary days are the actual prize rather than the toll I pay to reach the good parts. Dinner. A walk. A long argument about something neither of us can settle. If I am brilliant at Tuesdays, everything else in this book is gravy.

So I stay. Through the quiet stretches, through the hard year, and on the day somebody easier walks past. That is not duty and it is not something to be proud of. The ones who leave early simply never find out who the two of them would have become.

An empty chair pulled up close beside another chair in a quiet room. — Sitting Down First Two chairs pulled together and the lamp left on. Sitting down before trying to fix anything.

Sitting Down First Two chairs pulled together and the lamp left on. Sitting down before trying to fix anything.

Whatever the two of us have to work out, we work out between the two of us. In front of everybody else I am unmistakably on her side, and she never has to wonder about that.

When she is frightened, I sit down first. My instinct is to solve the thing inside sixty seconds, and I have had to learn that she usually does not want it solved yet. She wants somebody to stay in the room while it is still bad.

I find out what she would do with a free decade, especially the parts of it I cannot help with, and then I move whatever needs moving so she actually gets it.

And I would rather be known than admired. Admired is easier, and it is lonely. I want somebody who has seen the entire thing and stayed anyway.

There are three I will not bend on, and I am writing them down here so I cannot quietly negotiate them away later.

I want children.

I believe in God, and I take it seriously, though not conventionally and not quietly.

And I need a woman who thinks for herself and says so out loud, without softening it first.

That is the whole of it. The rest of this book is the fun part, and I cannot wait to get started.

A pair of double doors thrown wide at dawn, looking out onto a green meadow and a fruit orchard. — The Door Left Open The doors open onto the meadow and the orchard. Everything in the next ten chapters is out there.