3.27.24
And all I wanted was the simple things
A simple kind of life

You never know when a core memory is going to form. Maybe this will be one. Who can say until it shows up out of nowhere, maybe weeks, months, or years later?

Maybe nearly a quarter century later?

That’s the age of the core memory attached to to tonight’s song.

I can’t remember the specific date, but it was a Saturday morning in August 2000 at 3:48 a.m. I remember seeing the time on the dashboard clock. I’d just turned the car on. The headlights glowed on the front of the college apartment my then-wife and I lived with our seven-month old son. Simple Kind of Life — from No Doubt’s Return of Saturn album — had just started playing on 99.9 The Buzz as the radio came on.

I was up before the cows because I was on my way to milk the cows. Even though I’d left the far seven years earlier, I was helping out with the morning milking and chores because my grandfather, sister, and brother-in-law both had time off. And almost exactly a year earlier, my dad had suffered a heart attack. The usual available workers weren’t available, and I didn’t want Dad trying to do it on his own.

So I offered to help.

I was pissed at myself for offering. I’d worked so hard to leave the farm and establish a path for myself. Now I was doing the same thing Dad had done for years and years. I was getting up well before the asscrack of dawn, leaving my wife and kid at home, and milking cows and shoveling shit.

Growing up, Dad had always said to me, “You work hard in school. Go to college. Get a good job. You’re not shoveling cow shit for a living.”

His determination on my behalf was a big reason I was able to leave the farm. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, my offering to help was an attempt to return the favor in some small way.

That morning, though, all I could think about was how much less simple life was turning out to be, contrasted to how I expected things to go.

Not easy. I didn’t expect easy. But I did expect simple. I didn’t want to be the President or anything. “How complicated can things get if you keep a low profile?” I thought.

The answer, 25-year-old Ethan, is “Pretty complicated.”

Even more complicated that winding up right back where you started seven years earlier. And those complications … some you see coming a mile away; others show up unexpected and quicker than a Jack rabbit on methamphetamine.

What I didn’t know then about simple and complicated is this: simple is nice (and sometimes needed), but complicated makes you value stuff so much more than you would if it’d come easy.