Standing on a makeshift stage in the elementary school cafeteria, I smelled sour milk and heavy-duty bleach as parents took turns yelling at me about everything I was doing wrong.

“Why do you force our kids to go outside when it’s raining?”

“Your online registration is terrible.”

“You don’t have enough teachers.”

Everybody was angry. And nobody was eating the chocolate chip cookies I’d brought.

Twelve months earlier I’d quit my job and bet my career on an idea: build an afterschool program that kids loved, like camp, but that also delivered real learning, like school.

Friends had invested. Talented people had quit good jobs to join me. If these parents were right, I’d dragged all of them into the biggest mistake of my life. Every person who had said yes to me felt like another person I might disappoint.

It took just three weeks to go from “I did it!” to “What have I done?”

“Your snacks aren’t healthy.”

“I heard that your basketballs weren’t even inflated.”

Earlier that morning I told a buddy who invested, “It’s going well, super smooth,” which I somehow believed at the time. Now I wanted to shout at the parents, “Come on, give me a chance here!”

When I first pitched the program to an investor I knew, he loved the idea, and said, “I know other investors who’d be excited too.”

We spent months trying to reach his fundraising goal, but couldn’t get there, and on a Friday morning nine months before launch, I opened this email:

Given that we haven’t been able to raise enough funds, the other investors and I are all pulling out. You can try to proceed with the idea on a shoestring, or you can shelve it. I would counsel you to shelve it.

I slammed my laptop shut. I paced the room. I opened it back up, wrote angry emails, then deleted them.

At dinner Trish knew something was off. She asked, “What’s up?”

I nodded toward the kids at the table and smiled weakly. When the dishes were in the sink, I told her about the investors pulling out.

“What do we do now?” Trish asked quietly.

“I have no idea.”

She gave me a hug, and I laid my head on her shoulder, completely spent. I went to bed before the kids, probably for the first time since they were born. I slept for twelve hours.

I woke up with a glimpse of an idea. Instead of building the company I’d imagined, I’d build the smallest version that could survive. I called everyone I knew and asked for any amount they could swing, no number too small. Sometimes it felt like groveling. Other times I worried I was overpromising. But by the end of the week I had enough commitments to get the program off the ground.

We planned to open in four elementary schools. Twelve signed up. It never occurred to me to say no.

The first few days of school were a joy. Then something turned.

“Mr. Mark, I’m your new knitting instructor. Why am I in a karate class?”

“Dr. Rothschild, how am I supposed to teach pottery with crayons and jump rope?”

“Um, there’s no children here. Isn’t it Tuesday?”

Standing on the cafeteria stage in my tight and itchy sportscoat, I wanted to explain everything away. The registration software glitches weren’t on our end. The staffing problems were temporary. We’d inflate the basketballs tomorrow—who knew they’d be delivered deflated?

But I didn’t say any of those things. The parents didn’t come to hear my excuses.

I stepped off the stage and reached for a chair. It was one of those tiny chairs meant for first graders. I sat six inches off the ground, my knees up to my chest, while forty parents looked down on me.

“I’m sorry,” I began. “We got off to a terrible start. I took on too many schools before we were ready. Tell me how we can get better and we’ll do it.”

The room got quiet. We looked at each other. A few parents actually looked sorry for me.

“Well, you could start by serving better snacks. Raisins, dried fruit, less chips.”

“Can our children be excused to play when their homework is done?”

“And could you make sure my son brings home his sweatshirt? He always leaves it behind.”

I stayed late into the evening. Some parents said a few nice words to me, quietly, when it was all over. Some even shook my hand.

Over the next week I visited every school. I apologized. I listened. Then we got to work.

A month later I ran into one of the parents who had been furious with me at that first meeting.

“I don’t know why people were so rough on you that night,” she said, standing outside her son’s classroom, popping a few raisins into her mouth. “My son loves it here.”

I thanked her, turned the corner, and found a place to sit.

What’s your Tiny Chair Moment? I’d love to hear about something that changed the way you lead, parent, teach, or listen. Share it in the comments below.

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Trish and I were running late for a workout.

We parked at the top of the hill in front of the health club, and I spotted, way down below, a friend I’d been avoiding. Stopping to chat would have been awkward, and I was already late.

I spotted some hedges off to the side and went there to hide. There was a small opening, large enough for cowards, and I figured I could squeeze through, walk down that side of the hill, and get to the workout, sight unseen. I ducked under, tripped over some vines, and tumbled down the hill, rolling, scraping, gathering speed, and landed flat on my back on the cement sidewalk,

where I stared up at the sky wondering how to get up and still look cool.

I was pretty banged up and a little bloody, but it could have been much worse. I sprang to my feet, brushed myself off, and looked around to see who had noticed. A worker passing by looked me up and down and asked, “should I call security?” I didn’t know if he wanted to help me or remove me from the premises.

I went to the workout and pretended I was fine.

I said to Trish later, “My lesson for the day is not to take shortcuts.”

She looked at me and said, “That’s not the lesson.”

“What do you mean?”

She just shook her head.

Okay, I get it. I shouldn’t avoid things. But I’m terrific at it. I can get out of almost anything.

In graduate school, an earnest classmate named Saul kept asking me out for lunch. He had the goal of meeting every student from our class outside of school at least once. Over the course of a year, I had the flu, shingles, gout, visiting relatives, a juice cleanse, and once, mysteriously, “a neck thing.”

Eventually, he stopped asking. Avoidance works.

I come from a long line of avoiders. Growing up, my parents, brother and I avoided all public displays of affection. Private ones too. We weren’t big on expressing our fears either, which helps explain why I was comfortable not telling my mother about my open-heart surgery last year until two days afterward.

My surgery was set for a Tuesday morning, and the following Sunday was her 90th birthday party, which she had planned on her own to avoid telling my brother and me that she didn’t trust us to help. She said, “I just know what people want, sweetie.”

I knew how important the party was to her, but there was no way I could attend five days after surgery. But if I told her about the operation in advance, she’d worry. And maybe cancel it. I wanted to avoid that.

Plus, once your mother knows about something, it becomes real.

I hardly told anyone about the upcoming surgery, which is exhausting in its own way. I was having a conversation about a new restaurant with a friend and wondering: Should I tell her I’m getting heart surgery next week? That I might die before I eat the stuffed artichokes she’s raving about?

If I didn’t talk about it, I could pretend it wasn’t happening. That’s the beauty of magical thinking. You can pretend, once in a while, that the problem doesn’t exist.

And then it becomes unavoidable.

On the morning of the surgery, they wheeled me through the hospital on a gurney. The orderly made small talk as I lay flat beside him on the elevator. I played along, talking about the Cubs, wondering if that would be the last conversation of my life.

Lying alone on the gurney in the operating room under the brightest lights I’ve ever seen, I ran out of places to hide. I looked up at those harsh white lights.

They looked nothing like heaven.

The anesthesiologist got me ready and I looked into my surgeon’s eyes. Then everything went away.

I woke up feeling stoned, which was not altogether terrible. I heard everything went well, said I was thirsty and went back to sleep. I woke up the next day with a brutal hangover.

I called my mom from the hospital two days after the operation, three days before her party.

“Hey mom, I just had a sternotomy and am recovering in the hospital right now.” I thought “sternotomy” sounded minor. Too minor, it turned out.

“What in God’s name is a sternotomy? Did you make that up?”

I explained what happened, and my mom went from anger (“You couldn’t have scheduled it for after my party?”) to depression (“You’re all anyone will talk about”) to acceptance (“I’m grateful you’re okay”).

Her party was a huge hit, and life has mostly returned to normal. Almost.

Whether I’m catching my breath while out for a run or getting dizzy after standing up too quickly, there’s a voice that clears its throat and says, “Don’t get cocky. I’m still here.”

A few weeks ago, I tried to sneak through some hedges to avoid an awkward conversation and came out bloodied.

I brushed myself off and told Trish I was fine.

I was.

But also, you know, not.

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“You’re not gonna write about this, are you?” my mom asked, annoyed.

“Well, yeah, probably,” I said.

“Sheesh,” she replied. “Nothing’s private anymore.”

My mom grew up in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district during World War II.

By the time she was five years old, she was aware that many of her neighbors and friends had yellow stars on their clothes. One day, her mother came home without their weekly ration of bread. She had seen a group of Jews with armed soldiers next to them and tried to give some bread to the women. A soldier threatened her with a gun, grabbed the bread, and said if she had extra to give to Saujuden, she didn’t need any herself. She came home in tears.

Neighbors spied on neighbors and old friends turned against each other. Whenever my mom asked her parents what was happening, they’d say, “Shh, die Wände haben Ohren.”

The walls have ears.

She also grew up believing she was Catholic, but a year ago a DNA test revealed she was Polish and Jewish on her mother’s side. Since her mother wasn’t Polish or Jewish, the results didn’t make sense.

My mom dismissed the report. “The past is in the past. I don’t need a DNA test to tell me who I am.”

But recently, we were having lunch in her apartment when she suddenly said, “You know, after the war, we delivered matzah from Vienna to my aunts in the countryside.”

She took another bite of salad.

I put my fork down. “I’m sorry, what?”

“We brought it when we visited them. You couldn’t find matzah outside Vienna.”

“Were your aunts Jewish?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. There weren’t any Jews in the countryside.”

I waited. “Then why would they want matzah?”

She shrugged. “I guess they liked the taste.”

I stared at her. I found it hard to believe that rural Austrian Catholics had suddenly developed an inexplicable fondness for unleavened bread.

“Mom—”

“Oh, stop. You think everything is a bigger deal than it is.”

“Well yeah, that’s kind of what I do for a living.”

She considered this, then added, almost as an afterthought, “I suppose you’d think it’s a big deal that your grandfather was married to someone else before my mother.”

“What?” My mom was ninety. I was sixty. How was I just hearing this now?

“His first wife had an affair with their chauffeur,” she said. “They divorced and he married my mother, who was fifteen years younger.”

“Their chauffeur?” I asked. “Who had a chauffeur in 1930s Vienna?”

“I wasn’t there, Mark,” she said, waving her hand, as if I were the one complicating an otherwise perfectly normal story.

“Where did the money go?”

“He lost it in Monte Carlo.”

Obviously.

“Mom, maybe that’s why you’re Jewish on your mother’s side. Maybe your birth mother was actually your dad’s—”

“Or maybe my mom was Jewish all along and hid it.”

“Well, wouldn’t she have told you that once you married Dad? Your parents knew he was Jewish, right? Wouldn’t that have been a good time to tell you?”

She looked down at her plate.

“Well, she never believed the war really ended.”

I sat there for a moment.

“What do you mean she never believed the war really ended?”

“She never got over the trauma,” my mom said. “Too many neighbors did terrible things.”

“Did she ever talk about it?”

“No. We didn’t talk about things like that.”

I met my grandmother in her Vienna apartment when I was seven or eight. While the adults talked, I explored the apartment and sampled what looked like a cookie covered in whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles. It turned out to be a cracker with mayonnaise and something fishy. I spit it into the toilet.

There was also a white cross hanging above her bed. I stood in front of it for the family photo.

We stayed at a nearby hotel, but during our weeklong visit, my grandmother never left her apartment. At the time I thought it was because she was old. Now I understand it was something else.

My mother started jabbing her fork at the cake.

I took out my phone and showed her some funny pictures of my kids goofing off and she burst out laughing.

I love hearing her laugh.

Sometimes I think she’s surprised to be so happy.

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One frigid Chicago winter morning a couple years back I went outside to throw out my trash and saw my neighbor Garrett crouching by his plastic garbage can. I walked over to say hey and realized he was sawing a frozen squirrel in half.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“I dunno. Sadism? Taxidermy?”

“Nah. I think this guy chewed his way in, had dinner, and froze to death trying to get out,” Garrett said, sawing through the head and neck sticking out of the can.

I wondered what kind of guy sees a frozen squirrel and thinks, “I should get my hacksaw.” I would have left the squirrel there till spring. For all I know, the little guy might have woken up in April, thawed out and gone about his business.

I went back inside.

“Garrett’s cutting a frozen squirrel in half.”

“Mm-hmm,” Trish said, without looking up from her laptop. “Did you offer to help?”

“Hell no. It’s psychotic. Plus, it’s freezing outside.”

Garrett and I had been friends for a handful of years.

Now we don’t speak anymore.

When we first moved to the neighborhood, Garrett and his wife had us over for dinner before anyone else did. We hung out in the kitchen drinking wine and gorging on tapas until they said, “Let’s go outside for dinner,” and we realized that none of that had been dinner. Later that night Garrett showed me his bourbon collection lying on the floor of a spare bedroom and made me take one home.

Their annual party was apparently legendary. We went once. There were cocktail waitresses in body paint and thongs. We’re not prudes, but we didn’t go back.

Garrett gave me great advice on the business I was building, urging me to think bigger than I had been. Trish and I went to his daughter’s backyard graduation party, and he and his wife came to my son’s bar mitzvah. We were all in our forties then, still collecting new people to see who stuck.

The summer after the squirrel, my wife and I had a neighborhood barbeque, and I handed Garrett a martini and sat down to talk. An election was coming up, and I wondered where his head was at. More than once, Trish or I would read something in the news and say, “I wonder what Garrett would say.”

As I poured another drink at the barbeque, I said something snarky about a certain presidential candidate. When Garrett disagreed, I said, “Well you won’t put up a lawn sign, right?”

He glared right through me.

His wife laughed and said, “Don’t worry, there won’t be any signs,” which only pissed him off more. Within a few minutes he was gone.

Drunken texts followed. I don’t recall what I said, but I’m sure it was stupid. He texted right back and said, “My last Jewish neighbor would never tell me who I can and can’t vote for.”

He was referencing the folks who owned our house before us, who were Jewish too. There weren’t a lot of us in this part of town.

I read the text over and over. I suddenly wasn’t his neighbor who happened to be Jewish. I was his “Jewish neighbor.”

As a child of a Holocaust survivor, I carry around a private question: who would hide us if things got rough? Until that night, Garrett was pretty high on my list.

We haven’t spoken since. Garrett moved away from the neighborhood a few years after that, and our paths haven’t crossed.

Well once, actually.

My wife and I were on a trip in the Bahamas and saw Garrett and his wife checking in as we were leaving. I was excited and called out their names like we were still great friends. He flashed a smile when he saw me, then caught himself.

“The weather’s gorgeous here,” I said to his wife with way too much enthusiasm. Garrett acted like he spotted someone he knew across the lobby and walked over without looking back. The women hugged. Trish and I rolled our bags toward the exit.

Garrett cut the squirrel in half.

I walked away.

We both thought the other one was the problem.

We were both right.

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I dyed my hair today.

Not dyed exactly. It’s called “camo.”

“Your hair is 60 percent grey and 40 percent black,” my stylist explained. Camo will flip that around. You’ll take five years off, guaranteed.

For $60 I got five years back. Looking at the photo above, I might have overpaid. I don’t hate the look, but the swoop in the front makes me look like a middle-aged cockatiel.

I haven’t gotten Botox or skin peels like some of my friends, but I do darken my hair, lighten my teeth, and try to slim my stomach with intermittent fasting every day and Spanx on the holidays. I don’t think my wife would leave me if I didn’t do these things. In fact, no one would even notice. So why bother?

I guess if I stop, I’d be admitting something I’m not willing to say out loud. At least not yet.

I’m sixty-two. People say I look five years younger, but they’re just being polite. When they say I look fifty-seven, I know they’re really saying I look sixty-two. My goal is to hear someone say “mid-fifties.”

Mid-fifties means relevance. Mid-fifties means the corner office, where people do what you tell them to. Mid-sixties pushes you into the boardroom, where people write down what you say then do whatever the hell they want.

Mid-fifties isn’t really about how you look. It’s about where you stand. At fifty-five, people assume you’re on your way somewhere. At sixty-two, they assume you’ve been there and should be getting the hell out of there.

I shouldn’t complain. It was my choice to sell my business and move on. And I don’t miss the heavy workload. I chose to step off the track. But is it wrong that I want the optics of still being on it? Sitting on boards and writing essays is one thing. But it’s not the same as beating quarterly revenue projections.

This afternoon, fresh haircut and all, I stopped in a women’s store with my wife so she could get a dress for her upcoming business trip to Hong Kong. I sat in the husband chair, and the owner offered me a drink.

“Retired?” she asked, handing me a club soda.

What the hell? Is she even looking at my haircut? Why would she think I was retired?

I complained to Trish later in the car.

“I sit on four boards and write essays six days a week,” I said.

“Well honey,” Trish said calmly, “It’s 3pm on a Friday and you’re at a dress store with your wife…”

I just looked at her.

It’s easy for her to say. She’s in her late fifties and looks great. She’s also a CEO. Just because I sold my business and don’t have a job doesn’t mean I’m retired, does it?

Oh shit, it might.

I have an embarrassing memory from when I was in my twenties. I was on a rooftop restaurant looking out over Chicago’s skyline and I thought to myself, someday this will all be mine. It was a trite thought and I’m grateful I didn’t say it out loud. But now I sometimes wonder where that guy went. Is he dead? And if so, is that a bad thing?

It never became “all mine,” but I did okay. I built a business, a career, a family, and now I advise a few businesses and nonprofits. And while writing may not be the same as beating revenue projections, it’s not a bad gig.

Some days I wonder if I walked away too soon, like when former coworkers ask if I’m bored.

Other days I think this is exactly what I worked for. #livingthedream.

Depends on the day.

Either way, I’m not going to stop the camo.

That shit works.

Not on my age. But on the story I’m telling myself about who I am.

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