What a long, strange trip it’s been.
It is about the journey, not the destination.
Part Two of my Concord, Delaware saga was to get stuff.
There are many fascinating aspects of my friend Hack's life. We’ve been friends for over 45 years. However, for this story, here are the first three things to know about Hack: 1) He doesn’t like to fly. 2) He doesn’t like to drive. 3) He has a lot of stuff.
Hack knows what he likes and knows what he doesn’t like. I should consider our enduring friendship an unusual compliment. I always admired Hack’s courage. If he didn’t want to do something, he didn’t do it. After college, Hack used his math degree to get a job as an actuary at an insurance company and later as a programmer, but writing code lost its appeal, so he quit and basically stopped working. He cut out all avoidable expenses and simplified his life in quite a Thoreauvian way. He narrowed his world down to three basic passions: star-gazing, running, and music.
Every clear night since he was a teenager, Hack has ventured out to view the stars and planets. We spent many an evening on Cape Cod with Hack expertly pointing out the constellations and with me promptly forgetting them. Every night, he updates his star journal. I don’t think that will become a best seller, but you have to be impressed by his perseverance.
Hack’s dedication to running has seen him limp through some debilitating injuries over the years, but he likes running, so he does it every day. I believe Hack’s consecutive daily run streak is about 13,000 days or 36 years. His usual daily run is about 6-7 miles, so he must be close to 100,000 miles or NYC to LA 40 times. Hack is not only consistent; he is fast. His Spartan lifestyle has him eating just enough to fuel his runs, and Hack has become one of the fastest over-55 trail runners in the Atlanta area.
For years, Hack’s most valuable possession was his massive music collection. He never went anywhere without lugging his milk crates of records, or later his neatly alphabetized CDs. Whenever he had to merge his recent CD purchases, it would take him ages to resort his entire collection. Hack has also compiled his personal top 100 songs of the year annually since 1974. His knowledge of pop music is encyclopedic, and his passion is contagious, even if our tastes diverged over the years. He always had plenty of singles and albums to entertain me in my preferred sub-genre: ska music from the 1980s.
The quandary Hack faced was that he had a ton of stuff in Massachusetts, and he was living in Georgia. Since he had shifted all of his crucial stuff with him during his move down to Georgia, he was happy knowing that his mom’s attic was crammed full of his non-vital paraphernalia. Hack had two masses of stuff until his mother decided to sell her house and move to a small apartment.
While he never tipped over into the “hoarder” category, Hack was, shall we say, an eclectic collector. Besides the normal stuff that accrues and crustrulates in attics, such as old furniture, letters, tennis rackets, and baseball gloves, books that didn’t quite reach prime bookshelf status, but certainly couldn’t be thrown away, and bags of clothes that never made it to Goodwill, Hack also had his own brand of stuff-that-belongs-in-the-attic. At one point, he had a dozen pairs of running shoes. He also kept his old computers, computer games, files, and computer magazines. He has preserved board games he had enjoyed in childhood. He saved practically every receipt from everything he had ever purchased. I once asked him about the cataloged receipts, and he said something like “When I look at them, I can remember everything about that day.” This response made sense of his collecting, for he has a phenomenal memory, and who would want to have access to a lifetime of memories?
I knew that Hack would have trouble discarding so many artifacts from his youth because I had seen him accumulate stuff since we had met in middle school. He used to have piles of desiccated rubber bands. He had old golf balls, but didn’t play golf. Did he actually have a ball of string? Or was that just in my imagination?
So to get Hack’s stuff, I agreed to fly down to Georgia, where we rented a car. Armed with a tiny thumb drive that contained his complete music collection, we visited the four Concords of Georgia that I missed during my first trip to the Atlanta area. We then headed north and swung by two Concords in Delaware before heading back up to Massachusetts, where we spent the weekend. I headed home to catch up with my family, but Hack had a miserable time painfully culling massive piles of papers and a jumble of memorabilia from his youth. He ended up packing 50 40-gallon black plastic bags (sorted by recyclable or non-recyclable) then making a dozen trips to the dump before tetrising the surviving treasures into our bloated mom-van rental and heading back down to Georgia. We drove the 20-hour trip straight through.
I am not usually such a good friend. In fact, I have been a miserable correspondent with Hack for the past ten years, but this was a challenge, an adventure, a quest, and it included six more Concords.
I rescued his stuff.
Maybe this Concord project is making me a better human being.
It is about the journey, not the destination.
Part Two of my Concord, Delaware saga was to get stuff.
There are many fascinating aspects of my friend Hack's life. We’ve been friends for over 45 years. However, for this story, here are the first three things to know about Hack: 1) He doesn’t like to fly. 2) He doesn’t like to drive. 3) He has a lot of stuff.
Hack knows what he likes and knows what he doesn’t like. I should consider our enduring friendship an unusual compliment. I always admired Hack’s courage. If he didn’t want to do something, he didn’t do it. After college, Hack used his math degree to get a job as an actuary at an insurance company and later as a programmer, but writing code lost its appeal, so he quit and basically stopped working. He cut out all avoidable expenses and simplified his life in quite a Thoreauvian way. He narrowed his world down to three basic passions: star-gazing, running, and music.
Every clear night since he was a teenager, Hack has ventured out to view the stars and planets. We spent many an evening on Cape Cod with Hack expertly pointing out the constellations and with me promptly forgetting them. Every night, he updates his star journal. I don’t think that will become a best seller, but you have to be impressed by his perseverance.
Hack’s dedication to running has seen him limp through some debilitating injuries over the years, but he likes running, so he does it every day. I believe Hack’s consecutive daily run streak is about 13,000 days or 36 years. His usual daily run is about 6-7 miles, so he must be close to 100,000 miles or NYC to LA 40 times. Hack is not only consistent; he is fast. His Spartan lifestyle has him eating just enough to fuel his runs, and Hack has become one of the fastest over-55 trail runners in the Atlanta area.
For years, Hack’s most valuable possession was his massive music collection. He never went anywhere without lugging his milk crates of records, or later his neatly alphabetized CDs. Whenever he had to merge his recent CD purchases, it would take him ages to resort his entire collection. Hack has also compiled his personal top 100 songs of the year annually since 1974. His knowledge of pop music is encyclopedic, and his passion is contagious, even if our tastes diverged over the years. He always had plenty of singles and albums to entertain me in my preferred sub-genre: ska music from the 1980s.
The quandary Hack faced was that he had a ton of stuff in Massachusetts, and he was living in Georgia. Since he had shifted all of his crucial stuff with him during his move down to Georgia, he was happy knowing that his mom’s attic was crammed full of his non-vital paraphernalia. Hack had two masses of stuff until his mother decided to sell her house and move to a small apartment.
While he never tipped over into the “hoarder” category, Hack was, shall we say, an eclectic collector. Besides the normal stuff that accrues and crustrulates in attics, such as old furniture, letters, tennis rackets, and baseball gloves, books that didn’t quite reach prime bookshelf status, but certainly couldn’t be thrown away, and bags of clothes that never made it to Goodwill, Hack also had his own brand of stuff-that-belongs-in-the-attic. At one point, he had a dozen pairs of running shoes. He also kept his old computers, computer games, files, and computer magazines. He has preserved board games he had enjoyed in childhood. He saved practically every receipt from everything he had ever purchased. I once asked him about the cataloged receipts, and he said something like “When I look at them, I can remember everything about that day.” This response made sense of his collecting, for he has a phenomenal memory, and who would want to have access to a lifetime of memories?
I knew that Hack would have trouble discarding so many artifacts from his youth because I had seen him accumulate stuff since we had met in middle school. He used to have piles of desiccated rubber bands. He had old golf balls, but didn’t play golf. Did he actually have a ball of string? Or was that just in my imagination?
So to get Hack’s stuff, I agreed to fly down to Georgia, where we rented a car. Armed with a tiny thumb drive that contained his complete music collection, we visited the four Concords of Georgia that I missed during my first trip to the Atlanta area. We then headed north and swung by two Concords in Delaware before heading back up to Massachusetts, where we spent the weekend. I headed home to catch up with my family, but Hack had a miserable time painfully culling massive piles of papers and a jumble of memorabilia from his youth. He ended up packing 50 40-gallon black plastic bags (sorted by recyclable or non-recyclable) then making a dozen trips to the dump before tetrising the surviving treasures into our bloated mom-van rental and heading back down to Georgia. We drove the 20-hour trip straight through.
I am not usually such a good friend. In fact, I have been a miserable correspondent with Hack for the past ten years, but this was a challenge, an adventure, a quest, and it included six more Concords.
I rescued his stuff.
Maybe this Concord project is making me a better human being.
This was a classic drive-by Concord.
There was a Concord High School and a Concord Street and even a Concord Mall. We met a guy who confirmed that the neighborhood used the name "Concord," but after a fairly long stay exploring the other Concord in Delaware, Hack and I were eager to get back to continuing our 20 hour drive from Atlanta to Boston.
There have been a handful of these places where I couldn't discover a story. Usually this was because a lack of time. I'm sure there is a story in this Concord somewhere.
There was a Concord High School and a Concord Street and even a Concord Mall. We met a guy who confirmed that the neighborhood used the name "Concord," but after a fairly long stay exploring the other Concord in Delaware, Hack and I were eager to get back to continuing our 20 hour drive from Atlanta to Boston.
There have been a handful of these places where I couldn't discover a story. Usually this was because a lack of time. I'm sure there is a story in this Concord somewhere.
