Every Sunday evening, when the house settles into that rare, humming quiet, I catch myself looking at the small clutter on my dresser. A handful of keys. A notepad scrawled with hardwood inventory notes. A lanyard from a baseball research convention. An appointment card tucked into the edge of the mirror.
None of us get to live a single, linear life anymore. We aren’t defined by one neat line on a business card or a single title on a LinkedIn header. Most days, life feels less like walking a path and more like juggling an assortment of hats—swapping them out mid-stride, adjusting the brim, and trying desperately not to let the weight of one crush the duties of another.
If you caught me on any given Tuesday, you might encounter three or four different versions of me before lunchtime.
Here is what that juggling act really looks like from the inside out.
The Retail Floor: The Weight of Craft and Community
For forty hours a week (and often the quiet hours in between), I am the sales manager for a small, independent, family-run furniture store.
Working in independent retail today is an exercise in grit. You aren’t just selling a dining room set or an upholstered sofa; you are carrying the trust of neighbors. When someone walks into a family store, they aren’t looking for a sterile warehouse transaction. They are looking for honest counsel. They want to know if that oak table will survive their toddler’s spilled juice, or if a recliner will bring relief to an aging parent’s bad back.
As a manager, my mind is constantly running a split-screen. One half tracks delivery logistics, margin pressures, showroom layout, and mentoring a floor team that feels more like family than staff. The other half is listening closely to the person standing in front of me.
In a world increasingly dominated by nameless algorithms and flat-pack cardboard shipped to front porches, standing on a showroom floor reminds you that physical craftsmanship and genuine human connection still matter. It teaches you patience, accountability, and the delicate art of listening before you speak.
The Home Front: Loving in the Shadow of the Unknown
Then the store keys go into my pocket, the showroom lights click off, and I step into the role that matters more than all the rest combined: being a husband.
Right now, that role looks entirely different than it used to. We are currently navigating a season of unknown medical challenges.
There is a specific, quiet ache that comes with an ambiguous diagnosis. When an illness has a name, you can read the pamphlets. You can map out a treatment schedule. You can rally against a defined opponent. But when doctors run test after test, when symptoms flare and fade without a clear pattern, and when every medical portal notification brings a knot to your stomach—you find yourself in uncharted water.
My greatest internal struggle lately is figuring out how to truly support her.
My natural instinct, honed by decades in management and problem-solving, is to fix things. I want to organize the records, interrogate the data, find the specialist, and solve the riddle. But you cannot manage your way out of your spouse’s physical suffering.
I am learning, slowly and imperfectly, that sometimes the strongest support isn’t an action item or a pep talk. Sometimes it’s sitting on the edge of the bed in silence, holding her hand, and making space for her exhaustion. It’s taking over dinner without being asked. It’s keeping the household steady so she doesn’t have to carry the mental load while her body fights an invisible battle. It is a profound, vulnerable kind of love—one stripped bare of easy answers.
The Baseball Commons: Stewardship and the Society for American Baseball Research
When the evening clears and caregiving duties allow a breath of air, another part of my brain lights up. For years, my intellectual haven and creative community has been SABR—the Society for American Baseball Research.
Serving on the SABR Board of Directors for chapters and members is one of the great privileges of my life. Baseball research might sound like a niche passion to outsiders, but anyone who belongs to SABR knows it is a vibrant, generous fellowship of historians, analysts, writers, and fans who love the game down to its deepest roots.
Wearing the board hat means being an architect and a bridge-builder. My days here aren’t spent just debating historic box scores; they are spent offering guidance to local chapter leaders, troubleshooting administrative hurdles, and playing matchmaker.
Few things bring me more professional joy than noticing two members working on adjacent projects—perhaps an independent researcher digging into 1920s minor league rosters in the Midwest and a collegiate statistician compiling stadium data—and introducing them. Watching a creative spark turn into a collaborative, peer-reviewed study reminds me of the power of shared curiosity. It’s stewardship in its purest form: protecting the culture of an organization and ensuring every member, whether an author of ten books or a rookie enthusiast, feels valued and heard.
The Generational Thread: Father, Uncle, and Mentor
Woven through all these external commitments is the foundational role of family and mentorship.
I am a father to a good, kind son. In a loud, distracted world, watching him grow into a person of character is the quiet anchor of my life. Every decision I make—how I treat my customers, how tenderly I care for his step-mother, how I handle pressure—is an unspoken lesson passed down to him.
Right alongside that is the absolute joy of being an uncle to two beautiful nieces. Being an uncle gives you the rare permission to step outside the disciplinary trenches of daily parenting and just be a source of encouragement, fun, and unconditional belief.
That impulse to nurture doesn’t stay confined to family dinners. It naturally bleeds back into SABR, where I spend intentional time mentoring newer members. Walking into an established historical society can be intimidating. People worry their research isn’t rigorous enough or that their questions are too basic. Sitting down with a new member to look over their draft, teaching them how to navigate archives, or simply saying, “Your voice belongs in this conversation,” is my way of paying forward the doors that were once opened for me.
Finding Balance Beneath the Brim
People often ask, “How do you keep it all together?”
The honest truth? Some days, I don’t.
There are afternoons when my mind drifts to test results while a customer asks about cushion density. There are nights when an unread board email sits in my inbox because I was too tired to do anything other than sit on the couch next to my wife.
The secret isn’t finding some mythological, seamless balance where every hat gets an equal percentage of each twenty-four-hour day. The secret is presence.
When I am at the store, I try to give the customer my full attention. When a SABR member reaches out for advice, I try to give them real focus. When my son speaks, I put my phone facedown. And when my wife is having a hard day, the rest of the world has to wait.
Life isn’t a neat, compartmentalized closet. These roles overlap, inform one another, and bleed together. The patience I practice on the furniture floor makes me a better board member. The analytical discipline I use in baseball research helps me navigate complex medical records. And the vulnerability of walking beside a hurting spouse deepens the empathy I bring to every single person who crosses my path.
It is a full, complex, sometimes exhausting life. But beneath all those different hats is just one man, doing his best to show up for the people who depend on him. And right now, that is more than enough.
