18. Five Lists of Five

Five Unique Events in Which I Have Participated.

1. Hearing a griot perform “songs to order” on a three-stringed instrument on a moonless night in the African Sahel.
2. Standing next to Jackson Browne at Outside Lands, taking in the same songs,  tapping our feet to the same beat—and shaking his hand.
3. Eating a monkey harvested fresh from the bush and served up to honor a guest in Guinea Bissau.
4. Dancing to exhaustion on the slopes of Kilimanjaro.
5. Thronging with tens of thousands at Place de la Concorde to shout the imperative “touche pas mon pote”

Five Largely Useless (to me) Things I Spent Hours Learning

1. Econometrics
2. How to mount a camel without serious injury
3. How to shoot a layup right handed (I am left-handed and never did learn)
4. Matrix algebra (see number 1 above)
5. Doing a full tune up on my car.

Five Rather Small Things I Treasure

1. The silky hair of a newborn
2. My bike lock key
3. My multi-tool
4. My wife’s earrings (all of them)
5. Contact lenses

Five Things I Remember about Bowmansville (my hometown)

1. The old broken-down delivery truck in which we illicitly played by the hour
2. The pine tree in the backyard that I climbed to its peak—swaying with it and the wind
3. The “diamond” where all that baseball magic started
4. The Sesquicentennial Celebration that Lasted all Summer in 1970
5. Agnes Bowman, whom I believed to be a witch, until she saved me from ignominy in the winter mud

Five Things I Think About Every Single Day

1. Restorative justice
2. My mom
3. How to help people stop being so angry about everything all the time
4. What leadership means
5. What I will do next