From the Editor’s Desk: This is What Matters Most (Premium)

Ahead of my trip today, our son visited, we got some bad news, and I was reminded about what’s most important in life.

Yeah, it’s been quite the weekend.

A bit of background. Maybe more than a bit.

Our son graduated from college a few years ago, and it’s been interesting watching him transition into a real adult. (I refuse to use the term adulting. You have a draw a line somewhere.) I was amused last year when he complained, as a resident of upstate New York but also a lifelong fan of the New England Patriots, that his taxes would be used to help pay for a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills, a local rival whom he still hates. But this year, he started taking the bigger steps of getting his New York driver’s license and car registration, and his own car insurance.

This should make me happy, as it saves us about $100 a month on insurance, for starters. But these changes also serve as yet another mortality reminder, or as I often put it, another nail in my coffin. So its bittersweet. I’m delighted to see him grow up, and I’m proud of the man he’s become. But also vaguely wistful for a past that will never return.

I wish that was what this article was about. But it’s not. Not entirely.

Mark being forced to help pay for his least favorite NFL team’s new stadium was just a preview of the negative experiences awaiting him as an adult. (This must be generational. I used to wonder why $6000 of the $8000 in property taxes we paid each year on our old house was used to help pay for a school system that I no longer had children enrolled in.) And what he found when he first tried to register his car in New York months ago was that it wasn’t going to go as smoothly as he’d hoped. He got a New York license easily enough. And the car insurance, with my wife’s help. But the registration? Not so much.

We were in Mexico when this started. The car is registered in my name, of course. The title was in our condo in Pennsylvania, and we wouldn’t be home until early May, over two months later at the time. No problem: My oldest sister lives nearby, and she has keys to the place. So she went over one day and Stephanie talked her through the process of finding the car title in whatever file cabinet it was in. Then she mailed it to Mark in upstate New York. Mark and Kelly, our daughter, visited us in Mexico City in early March, and he brought the title with him. So I signed it and filled out the small form on the back, transferring ownership to him. After the week was over, the kids flew home, Mark with the signed title.

But when Mark took some time off from work to register the car, he was told that the title needed to be notarized. And that would need to happen in Pennsylvania. For all the miles that title flew, to New York and then back and forth to Mexico, he would have to wait another two months … and then drive it back to Pennsylvania, where this all started. And so that’s what he did: Late last week, Mark and one of his roommates drove the four and a half hours down to our condo in Lower Macungie so we could finally get this done.

As a reminder, this is not what this article is about. Sorry.

Just before lunch on Friday, after I had finished Ask Paul, Mark and I drove over to the title company we’ve always used in Pennsylvania because they’re familiar, and they can notarize documents. It’s in a little building in Emmaus, in the next township over, two doors down from a car repair shop we have a lot of experience with. In fact, this business and its owner, Ali, have been fixtures in our lives during our time in Pennsylvania.

I’ve told this story somewhere, but when we first moved to Pennsylvania in 2017 and had just arrived, we were on a tight schedule for all kinds of reasons. We had done our last home swap with a family from Europe using our home in Massachusetts, came home, and then almost immediately drove to Pennsylvania in three cars, one of which was Mark’s, and a U-Haul truck containing a lot of our stuff. Kelly needed to be registered for school, and immediately, and so Stephanie and her ran around the area trying to sort that out. And we needed Pennsylvania license plates for all three cars. But Mark needed to drive back to New York so he could go back to college, and we only had a single day before he had to leave. And in addition to getting the plates, the cars had to be inspected, after which they would get a windshield sticker that’s good for a year. Our cars could wait, but we needed to sort Mark out immediately. So, him and I headed out to get that done.

It didn’t go well. I knew how this worked in Massachusetts, and you can pretty much just drive up to any garage that does inspections, pay the fee, and get it done right then. But everything in Pennsylvania is different, as we found out, and keep finding out all these years later. And we couldn’t even find a place that could do it soon, let alone that day. The two of us had driven into Emmaus but had gotten shut down twice, and I pulled into a parking lot so we could both search Google Maps for another place to try. At some point, I looked up into the rearview mirror and could see, in reverse, the words STATE INSP – EMISSIONS over one garage bay of a building across the street. It was an automotive repair shop, right there. And they did inspections.

“I may have found something,” I said to Mark, putting the car and reverse, turning around, and crossing the street. There, we met Ali, the owner of this business, a small, trim man with a big smile who I instantly liked. We told him what we needed, and he told us we could schedule an appointment in a day or two. So I said we needed it that day because Mark had to drive back to school. His classes were starting tomorrow.

Ali looked up at Mark and said, “Are you getting good grades?”

Mark said yes. And then Ali said, “then I’ll do it right now.”

And that was that. A friendship of sorts began, not in the sense that we ever once hung out together in private, but he was also more than just an acquaintance or “hello person”. Ali came in and out of our lives again and again. He called me early on to thank me for reviewing his business on Google Maps, something he had never really thought about before, he said, but it kept leading to new customers coming in. My wife and I always used his garage for every car service and repair imaginable, big and small. We would sometimes just stop by to say hi when we were in the area, and I was delighted to learn that he routinely traveled to Iraq to do help build schools, playgrounds, and homes, and to generally help the people there, and he had incredible stories.

And that was him in a nutshell. He wasn’t just willing to help, he was happy to help, and he was action, not words. When I gave my car to my daughter after she got her license, she immediately got into an accident, and though the car was fine except for the front corner, the state decided it was totaled. Ali also owned a body shop, so he repaired it for us, at a great discount over what we would have paid elsewhere, allowing this perfectly fine vehicle to stay on the streets. When Mark needed a newer car, Ali found him a Honda Civic–a car he always begged us to buy, or a Toyota, because the parts for our BMW were always so expensive, and he couldn’t stand paying those prices. And when Kelly went off to college herself, in North Carolina, she got in another accident and finally had to replace her car. So he found her a perfect used Civic too. Both the kids still have those cars, and both vehicles are still in great shape.

Anyway, it’s years later and Mark and I are standing in the title shop, getting the title I had already signed notarized. I joked with Mark that he still owed me the $1 that he supposed paid for this vehicle, and that I only took cash. The woman behind the counter had stepped to the side to photocopy the documents, and I said to Mark, “After we’re done here, let’s run over and say hi to Ali. I haven’t seen the guy since last Fall and I know he’d be ecstatic to see you again.” Mark was overjoyed by this–have I ever mentioned how good-natured he is?–and he agreed immediately. This would be great. Mark and Ali hadn’t seen each other in years.

“Um. You haven’t heard?”

I looked back at the woman behind the counter. She had spoken those words. And she did not look well.

“Ali passed away,” she said. “In December.”

“Are you kidding me?” were the stupid first words that came out of my mouth, which I instantly corrected. Obviously, she was not kidding. We didn’t even know each other. And people don’t kid about this kind of thing.

This was crushing. She told us that it was a heart attack, sudden and unexpected. We ended up speaking with her about this for about 20 minutes, trading stories. And I was not surprised to discover that he had touched other people’s lives in the same way he had touched mine, and ours, and no doubt many other lives in Iraq and elsewhere. It was confusing. And terrible. And wrong. I had a vague memory of Stephanie telling me–When was this? Late 2024? Maybe early 2025?–that she had texted Ali about something, and he had never texted back, and how odd that was for him.

Before I even knew what I was doing, I texted Stephanie to tell her the news. She wanted to know more, but we were still talking to the woman from the title company, so I had to beg off. Why had I just texted her like that?

We learned that Ali’s wife Zora had taken over the business. I had never met her. And she had done a remarkable makeover there. In fact, the woman’s son and husband had done that work for Zora, she told us. Of course. It’s a small town, a community. That’s how these things always work. Ali would come over and fake argue with her to the delight of the other customers in the title business, had been one of her stories. And her son and husband would later do the work to transform his business. These relationships amaze me.

I thanked her multiple times and told her that Mark and I would head over to the garage, two doors down, to meet Zora. I wanted to tell her something that I bet she’s heard from more people than she can count. Your husband impacted our lives in a very positive way. And he kept doing it. We loved that guy. And we are so sorry he is gone.

And so we walked over. Zora was not there, she was out running errands. But a mechanic there–we both recognized each other–filled us in on more details about what had happened. I guess they don’t matter to you, but we were there another 20 minutes or so, telling each other stories. And yes, the business was transformed. It’s not recognizable inside the doors. It’s really nice.

So we walked back to the title company, where my car was parked. I was telling Mark that Stephanie and I would make a point to come back and meet Zora soon. It’s important to me that she knows how much Ali mattered to us. And as we did this, the woman from the title company came out the front door. And then we talked about Ali for another 15 or 20 minutes. And I told her how nice the work was that her son and husband had done.

I’m almost there, promise. I’ve almost arrived at the point of this article.

Mark and I had planned to pick up lunch after getting the titles notarized. That had gone swimmingly, after all the months and stupidity, the notarization had taken barely 5 minutes. But now it was over an hour later, and we were driving to where we would get lunch and bring it back for everyone. Driving towards Macungie, that little township we lived in briefly, in an apartment. Where we had walked over to a local bar/restaurant because it was close by, and then made so many friends there that we went back once or twice every week ever since.

One more diversion. Sorry.

That little bar/restaurant closed last October when we were in Mexico. It’s impossible to overstate how devastating this was, especially learning about it from so far away. It was sudden and unexpected, and no one knows the real reason it happened, even now. But the business was doing great, so it’s mysterious. The food wasn’t even that good, but the reason this place was so special was the people. We had a get-together with that group back in September, and we had resolved to try to do a monthly get-together going forward, which we then screwed up by spending four straight months in Mexico in 2025. But then something wonderful happened. It would reopen. This hole would be filled. And it would happen in May, right after we got back. New name, new owners. We went to opening night and everyone was there. It was like it had never closed. We’ve been back two more times since then. It’s … the same. It’s like nothing had happened.

Anyway. Mark and I are driving to get lunch. I called Stephanie to fill her in on Ali. As I was wrapping that up, we were driving through Macungie. And I could see that little bar/restaurant from the street as we passed.

“Mark,” I said. “This has been an incredible reminder of what’s important in life.”

Yes. This is what this article is about. I know. Finally.

Our Mexico City experience is wonderful because we’ve landed in a community of wonderful people being wonderful to each other. I started to write something like, “we created a community…” but we had almost nothing to do with it, other than just being willing, open, and receptive to that experience. We see it for what it is, we love it, and we want to be part of it. I’ve written about this a lot, I’m sure it’s tedious, but this is important. There are all these definitions of home, one being that home is the place where they have to take you in. That’s accurate. But I think of home as the place you’re so welcome that you want to be there. That’s what our neighborhood in Mexico City is like. It’s affected me so much that I’ve stepped outside my insular little bubble and have reached out to people there. It’s rewarding.

But we have this experience in Pennsylvania too. Not everywhere in Pennsylvania. We were in that house in Lower Macungie for several years, but we barely cracked the code on our neighbors, who talked a lot about getting together but never did. And I spent the entire time willing those around us to just wave and say hi as I walked around the neighborhood. (Successfully, I might add.) But we had a real sense of community and fellowship in Macungie during our short time in that apartment, and it carried over into the time we kept spending there, mostly–but not exclusively–in that little bar/restaurant that closed. And then reopened.

I told Mark that what he had just witnessed, with the woman from the title shop and the mechanic from the garage and all the stories we all had, that Mark also has, celebrating Ali were important. That this type of thing was, in fact, the most important thing in life. The connections you can make with other people are so key. These connections can be negative, if that’s what you bring into it. Or they can be positive, even transformational. I told Mark about the people we know in Macungie, through the bar/restaurant, the apartment complex, and from just walking from one end of that township to the other, and how our continually intersecting lives were important. I did not need Ali to pass away to know that that man was special, we knew it, we shared it with him and with others. And yes, it is so good for my mental health right now that I did tell that guy, more than once, how special he was to me, and to us.

I got lucky there, maybe. That doesn’t always work out. Good intentions are just that, intentions. But the best thing you can do, the right thing to do, is make sure that the people who matter to you the most, know that. It’s all that matters. It’s everything.

And so we got lunch. And we drove home. We were gone much longer than expected. But it was time well spent. I wish I could have seen Ali one more time, but that’s selfish. As is my desire to talk to his wife, though I will do it, hoping that it matters to her in some small way. I do hope so.

Mark and his roommate left Saturday morning, and Steph and I got caught up on work ahead of today’s travel: This morning, I flew to Seattle for Build, and she drove back to Boston, after dropping me off at the airport, to visit her parents and friends. But that night, we went to Macungie, to that little bar/restaurant. We had all hugged and cried on our first night back, and I had felt like I was in the receiving line in a wedding. Or a wake, I guess. But it was good, and last night, we just sat across from and next to our friends at the bar. I couldn’t stop smiling, and one of them, he’s a little too observant, noticed. And he made a joke about it.

“I love you, man,” I told him, smiling like an idiot. He’s important to me. They all are.