Me. And me now.

Not long ago, at an art fair, I was walking around with a microphone, doing my version of the old-fashioned reporter on the street — stopping people and asking what they were seeing, what they were thinking, what was staying with them.

I stopped at a table of young people.

One of the women — at least a decade younger than my younger daughter — looked at the microphone, then at the waist bag it was sitting in.

She commented on the bag.

“Oh, this? I love Peak Design stuff.”

She agreed.

We started talking.

“What are you doing today, sir?”

“I’m recording conversations for my podcast.”

We talked a little more.

I told her I had just learned vibe coding because I wanted to build something I could see in my head.

Then came podcasting. Editing and production. Hosting conversations. Learning whatever the next idea seemed to require.

She looked at me.

“Dude. That is so cool.”

In about thirty seconds, I had gone from sir to dude.

Somewhere in there, retirement came up.

No golf. No pickleball.

My husband, billy, and I live up on the coast with our two dogs, and apparently retirement has turned into learning microphones, websites, podcasts and whatever else the next idea seems to require.

When we finished talking and I stopped the recording, one of her friends looked over and said, “Come have the mango curry with us.”

Of course I joined them.

They were all working in AI.

I loved the whole thing.

I’m 74, almost 75. My father died at 76, so that number has been sitting with me lately. Not exactly as a warning. More as a marker.

When I was young, I wished my father would teach me more. Only now do I wonder whether maybe he did.

He taught himself things. The accordion. The piano. How to build things. Once he built a fish tank into the wall of our apartment so that from the room we saw this wonderful spectacle while all the workings disappeared into the closet behind it.

He figured things out.

Apparently, I was watching.

For a good part of my life, I can’t had a pretty strong voice. Some of it came from other people. Eventually you become perfectly capable of supplying the voice yourself.

These days I’m more interested in two different questions:

What if?

And then:

Why not?

I didn’t know how to podcast, so I learned.

I didn’t know how to edit and produce audio, so I learned.

I didn’t know how to build the thing I could see in my head, so I learned.

But the tools are not really the point.

They are the workings behind the wall.

What interests me is what they make possible.

People.

A conversation that begins because someone simply asks a question.

A moment when someone says something they did not know they were thinking.

A room that feels different because people are actually paying attention to one another.

A stranger who becomes less of a stranger.

For a while, these things seemed separate.

Then I began to see the thread.

Connection.

Sometimes connecting people with one another. Sometimes making enough space for someone to reconnect with themselves.

And enthusiasm.

There are no courses in enthusiasm.

But I do know it’s contagious — not the kind that shuts us down.

What I began to understand was that the subject almost didn’t matter.

Different subjects. Different forms. Different places.

But underneath them, the same thing kept showing up.

Curiosity. Connection. A willingness to follow something and see where it leads.

Maybe those fragments were never really separate.

I just hadn’t recognized the thread yet.

What if?

Why not?

This morning, billy and I did our four-mile walk down through the cypress and along the bluff. Now I’m looking over the redwoods toward the ocean. One dog is asleep. The other is waiting for me to throw the ball.

And I’m still learning.

Still curious.

Still figuring things out.

At seventy-four, almost seventy-five, maybe I’m supposed to be narrowing the lens.

I seem to be doing the opposite.

I have two extraordinary grown daughters, each with her own version of enthusiasm, curiosity and figuring things out.

And now I have grandsons.

There is a particular reward in catching something familiar in their expressions, in their eyes, in their energy.

Maybe that is another way of seeing what carries forward.

And now, at seventy-four, I hear another version of the same old questions.

Only now, other people are asking them.

Sometimes I hear them out loud. Other times, I see the question before I hear it — in the look, the pause, the raised eyebrow, the expression that has already formed an opinion.

“I could never do that.”

“You really walk that far every morning?”

“You live all the way out there?”

“I don’t know how you do it.”

I shrug.

“Yup.”

That makes me smile.

I answered those questions a long time ago.

Me. And me now.

— James Joyce, Ulysses