Our Thing

There is a picture from around his second birthday. He is standing in the driveway holding a basketball that is almost as big as he is, looking up at the hoop with complete seriousness.

He couldn’t make the shot on his own. I would catch the ball on its way up and guide it the rest of the way in, or lift him over my head so he could drop it through himself. When it went in he celebrated like he had done it alone. I made a big deal of it every time.

That was the beginning.

When we moved to Philadelphia we didn’t have a driveway anymore, but there was a schoolyard at his school a few blocks away. By then we were already on our epilepsy journey, already living inside the routines and the vigilance and the weight of it. We’d walk over and shoot around. I taught him how to play 21, the same game I had played as a kid. It was something ordinary we could do together in the middle of everything that wasn’t.

When we moved into our current house, the basketball hoop was one of the first things we bought. We were playing before the furniture was arranged, before the boxes were unpacked, before the house felt like ours. After years in the city we finally had a driveway, a yard, open space. We went outside and used it.

A few days after we moved in, the neighbor kids knocked on the door and asked if my son wanted to play. I watched from the driveway as they shot around together. In the city, friendships had required effort and coordination, phone calls and scheduling, nothing that could just happen. This did. It reminded me of how I grew up, wherever we lived there were always kids around and you’d just find each other. He got that here. Maybe for the first time.

For a few years the three of them played together regularly. Eventually they grew in different directions the way kids do. But my son and I kept playing.

His school has an intramural basketball program and he joined it his first year there. He wasn’t always the best player on the floor but he was the one with the biggest heart. He became a leader on the team, the kind that the other kids looked to, not because of his stats but because of how he showed up. Being on a team with his friends, competing, belonging to something. That mattered.

We are five summers into this driveway now. He is taller than me. He blocks my shots in a way that is partly skill and partly satisfaction, and I can see both in his face when he does it. Before we play he puts on music. Rock and roll, always. The specific song rotates. If he’s losing he’ll sometimes switch to something with more energy, a more powerful jam, as if the playlist is responsible for the score. I let him believe that.

The only things keeping me competitive are my jump shot and my free throws. That balance is shifting. I know it.

I don’t mind. Every moment with him is something I don’t take for granted. I have watched him struggle with so much. And so when he makes a good shot, when he beats me and celebrates, when he is just a kid in the driveway playing basketball with his dad, I hold onto that. He is getting older. He has his own life filling in around him, his own friends, his own things. I am grateful we still have this one.

He’ll get home from school and ask if we can play. He puts the music on and we go outside.

That’s enough for me.

Whatever Comes After

I sat at a table in the gym at my son’s school. At the other tables, there were a dog groomer, a police detective, someone from the state park maintenance crew, an archaeologist, and other community members. We were there for career day.

My topic was AI.

I’ve spent more than a decade working in artificial intelligence. In most rooms, the conversation covers the hype, the promise, and the fear of what AI is taking away. Today it was about the kids. About how, whatever path they found, AI would be part of it. How it could help them be creative, express ideas, and make things that hadn’t existed before.

I wanted to use it as an opportunity to talk to the teachers as well. They were as curious as the kids, maybe more so. They chose this work deliberately, and they took everything seriously, including this. Some were more comfortable with technology than others, and some were still trying to separate what they’d heard about AI from what it actually was. But they knew it was here. They knew their students would use it. And they understood, maybe more clearly than most, that for kids like theirs it could be something more than a productivity tool. It could be an enabler. A way in to things that had felt out of reach.

The first group of kids entered the room.

I had a sign on my table. My name is Dave. My son goes here. He’s in tenth grade. Ask me about AI.

When each group came over I’d ask their names, what grade they were in. I told them my son went to this school. I asked if they knew what AI was and offered the simplest explanation I could — using a computer to create something new. Then I told them my son had made a song using AI. That it was on Spotify and Apple Music. And I played it.

They listened. When it ended I told them there was no one playing instruments, no one singing. A computer made all of it.

I asked them if they wanted to create something.

With the younger ones I had cards with Mad Libs style prompts. They would fill in the words and I would enter them and we would watch their idea become an image. Their dog as a superhero. A hero with brown hair wearing armor made of green dragon scales. They were amazed at how it worked. The words going in, the image coming out, something that hadn’t existed a moment before. I also had a handout they could take home, with example prompts their parents could try with them.

The middle school kids didn’t need the cards. They came up with their own ideas. One wanted an image of something specific. Another wanted a training plan for a video game he was trying to get better at. They knew what they wanted to make. They just needed someone to show them the tool.

Some had already used ChatGPT. A few had used it for homework. One girl said she used it as someone to talk to.

That made me think about my son.

About the years he spent on the outside of social groups, wanting to be understood, not always finding the right person or the right moment. About what it would have meant to have something that would just listen. That wouldn’t get tired or distracted or move on. The adults in the room were thinking about AI in terms of what it might take from these kids. That girl was using it for something the adults hadn’t thought to offer her.

That’s always the interesting part. Not what the technology is supposed to do. What people actually do with it.

I was waiting at my station when a few of his teachers stopped by to tell me he had been excited about career day. That he had prepared questions. That he was ready.

When his group came in, he started at the far end of the gym. I watched him work his way around the room, stopping at each station, his piece of paper in hand. He was serious in a way that was hard not to notice. Not performing seriousness. Actually in it. Each presenter got his full attention.

Eventually he made his way to me. He had a wry smile when he arrived, like he had been saving something.

He asked me what I wanted to be when I was younger.

I told him I wanted to be a marine biologist for most of my life. That I was always good with computers and had my first one around age ten and started learning to program. That somewhere along the way the computers won.

He listened. He wrote something down.

We’ve had this conversation before. A few times, actually. It’s not one of the things his brain decided to store, so each time it comes back around it’s new to him. I don’t mind. I’ll answer it as many times as he asks.

He worked through the rest of his list until he was done. I watched him move on to the next table, his paper still in hand. And then it was over. I packed up my things and he walked back across the gym to join me.

As we walked to the car, I asked him how it went, and who he talked to, and what he learned. He was excited that he got to pet the dog. He was interested in the auto body shop, and I told him they were the ones who fixed the mirror on our car. I don’t know if he was looking at any of them as possibilities. I just loved that he was curious.

His school thinks about this deliberately. They talk about life after graduation as something to prepare for, not just something that happens. Giving kids a glimpse of what their futures could look like, what’s out there, what questions are worth asking. They’re educating the whole child. The curiosity. The encouragement to chase it. The bravery to follow through. That’s how they do it.

He showed up with questions. He asked every one of them and left curious about something new.

Whatever comes after, that’s a place to start.

What Could Have Been

I was listening to a podcast recently about a woman in her seventies, semi-retired, describing a life built around boards and civic connections and a career that had opened into something expansive in its later years. She sounded settled in a way that felt earned, like she had arrived somewhere she had been moving toward for a long time.

I recognized the path. Not because I’m in my seventies, but because I was on a version of it.

When we moved from Colorado to Philadelphia about a decade ago, I was a senior director at a Fortune 50 company with real scope and responsibility. A few years into that role, I joined a civic leadership program that brought executives from major Philadelphia companies into the city’s nonprofit community. Over the course of a year, you got deep exposure to the city’s history and institutions, built relationships across industries, and came out the other side connected in a particular way. The expectation was that you’d land on a board somewhere, that you’d become someone who contributed to the city in that civic, executive register. The people around me were doing exactly that, and I could see the same future taking shape for me.

Burnout changed the calculation. So did my family needing more of me than that version of my life was leaving room for. I stepped back from the executive track and took an individual contributor role after we moved to the suburbs, trading scope and gravity for time and presence.

What I didn’t fully anticipate was where that would eventually land me. I’m in my early fifties now, a single dad doing his best to hold things together, and the life I’m living looks almost nothing like the one I was building toward in that leadership cohort. The board seat, the Philadelphia connections, the version of myself moving through the city with a sense of purpose and forward momentum — that version didn’t make it here. Not yet, anyway. Maybe not ever.

The woman on the podcast wasn’t describing my life. She was describing what my life looked like from a certain angle, at a certain moment, before it went somewhere else entirely.

I think about that when I think about my son’s future.

I spend a lot of time with the map of what his life might look like — the limitations, the closed doors, the jobs that seem within reach, and the ones that probably aren’t. I carry a picture built from everything I know right now, shaped by twelve years of navigating his condition, watching carefully, and trying to be realistic without being defeatist. It feels like an honest picture.

But five years ago, I would not have predicted this. Not the single part, not the scraping-by part, not the individual contributor part. The version of me in that leadership program had a reasonable picture of the next decade, but it was wrong in almost every respect.

That doesn’t mean his future is full of hidden good news I can’t see yet. I’m not reaching for easy comfort. The limitations are real. The hard parts are real. Uncertainty isn’t the same as hope, and I try not to confuse the two.

But I’m holding his map a little more loosely than I used to. If my own path could shift that completely in five years, I don’t actually know what his looks like in five years either. The shape I think I can see might not be the shape it takes. The road I think he’s on might lead somewhere neither of us expects.

Most days, that doesn’t feel comforting. It just feels true.

Five years ago, I would never have thought I’d be here. And that might be the only honest thing I know about the future.