I walked into a bar in Kansas City the other night and saw somebody I hadn’t seen in years, a guy I used to ride the school-bus with when I was a kid growing up in McPherson, Kansas. I never took the time to get to know him then, maybe because he possessed an aloofness that made me uncomfortable, more likely because I considered myself better than him. I don’t remember the name of the road his family lived on, but I do remember how to get there. Take Old 81 north out of McPherson, turn left at the cemetery road, follow the asphalt until it disintegrates into gravel, the land grows flat and barren, and trees become nonexistent. There, on a desolate piece of land to your left, you’ll see a weary bungalow that may have been green before the wind and dust blasted it gray. This guy’s family eked out a living raising cattle there, though to say they were ranchers would’ve been a stretch. He was older and rougher and thinner (just like me) and when I walked over and asked him if I could join him he didn’t object. We drank our beers and I tried to make conversation, to reminisce, until he finally opened up and told me the happiest times in his life were when he was a boy and his father could afford to stop working long enough to take him and his brother to the stockyards in Kansas City to sell and pick up more cattle. He told me both his parents died of cancer several years after he graduated from high school, that the house burned in an electrical fire not long after they died, that he’d lost track of his brother, and his sister was a single mom raising three kids while working a register at Wal-Mart. After that, he stopped talking and waited for me to respond. I stammered. I had no reply to match the weightiness of what he’d just told me, and he took the last swig of his beer, told me it was good seeing me again, and walked out. If I live to be one hundred I doubt that I’ll ever see him again. I drove home to an empty house that evening (my wife was out with friends). A cold front was moving in, and I took my dog and went outside and sat on the deck in the dark. The temperature dropped, the wind picked up, and it started snowing. I sat there thinking about how unrelenting life can be, how it continues to put you in places you don’t want to be, exposes you to things you don’t want to see, and forces you to react despite your desire to remain indifferent. I’m in my fifties now and still have much to learn.