JulieBolejack

This morning my husband and I sat on the porch drinking coffee and doing something that has apparently become a revolutionary act in modern America:

We talked to each other.
No television humming in the background.

No phones in our hands.
No endless scrolling.
No one multitasking.

Just coffee. Morning air. Two people talking about life.

And somewhere in the conversation, we wandered backward into childhood memories — the strange little fragments we carry around for decades without really examining them too closely.

It started simply enough.
My husband mentioned that he was the fourth child in his family, with a fairly large age gap between him and his older siblings.

“I was an accident,” he said matter-of-factly. “I always knew I was an accident.”

You can imagine my reaction.
But then I laughed and said, “Yes, but your mother liked you best, and you know it.”

And without missing a beat, he replied:
“Well, somebody had to hand her the clothes from the laundry basket while she hung them on the clothesline because her back hurt.”

And we both burst out laughing.

That’s the funny thing about old memories. Sometimes they begin as a tiny flash — a sentence, a smell, a single image — and then suddenly the story expands. Details return. Feelings reappear. You start examining moments from fifty or sixty years ago as if you’ve just rediscovered them in a dusty box in the attic.

Then he told me another story.
When he was a little boy, his father took him along one evening while he attended some kind of meeting in Indianapolis with his boss. My husband stayed in the car alone while his father went inside.

He remembered being afraid at first.
It was nighttime.

There were bright lights.
People walking in and out.
Cars moving around.
A strange place for a little kid to sit alone.

But then curiosity took over.
He became fascinated watching people move through the night. Watching headlights. Watching the world.
Years later, he realized where he had been parked.

In front of a bar called Netos.
Now if you grew up around Indianapolis years ago, you may remember it was — owned by Indiana basketball legend Netolicky.

The strange part is that his father didn’t drink, he wasn’t in the bar but in the hotel next door.

At any rate, the whole memory felt odd.
How long was the meeting with the boss?

And suddenly two older people are sitting on a porch in Indiana decades later saying:

“Well… what the hell was THAT about?”
Why leave a child in the car at night?
Oh yes, the child was sick and in quarantine and the rest of the family were at a school event. The details emerge.

And honestly, it was wonderful.
Not because every old memory is beautiful.

Some aren’t.
Not because our parents always made perfect decisions.
Clearly, they did not.
But because memory itself is such a fascinating thing.

A tiny recollection can unfold into a larger understanding of who we were, how families functioned, what people carried silently, and how much of life was simply ordinary humans trying to get through the day the best they could.

I think many of us are hungry for these kinds of conversations right now.
Not performative conversations.
Not debates.
Not commentary designed for algorithms.
Real conversations.

The kind where people drift naturally through stories and laughter and confusion and memory.
The kind where nobody is trying to win.
The kind where you suddenly realize:
“Oh my God… I haven’t actually slowed down enough to talk like this in a very long time.”

And maybe that’s part of the problem.
We are consuming endless information while neglecting the stories sitting quietly inside our own families.

Meanwhile, some of the best moments in our lives are still happening in the background.

We get updates from younger family members about the hilarious things the little children are doing now — the odd questions they ask, the dramatic declarations, the accidental wisdom that only children can produce.

And those stories become part of the family archive too.
One day those children will be sitting on a porch somewhere recalling fragments of these years.
Maybe they’ll remember a kitchen smell.

A song.
A thunderstorm.
A dog.
A grandparent laughing.
A strange trip somewhere.
A feeling they couldn’t explain at the time.

And the story will begin expanding all over again.
I think we should do more of this while we still can.
Sit outside.
Turn things off.
Talk longer.
Ask follow-up questions.
Tell old stories.

Laugh about the absurdity of being human.
Even the strange memories deserve a little daylight.
Especially the strange ones.
Because sometimes the smallest remembered moments turn out to be the threads that quietly hold an entire life together.

Julie Bolejack, MBA
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