The Visits You Have Left

My father called me last Tuesday to ask how to forward a text message.

It took eleven minutes. He kept pressing the wrong thing, and I kept saying “no, hold it down, hold it down,” and at one point he put the phone on speaker so he could see the screen and I got to listen to him breathe while he looked for the button. When he finally got it, he said “well, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever had to learn,” and then we talked for another twenty minutes about nothing. The Braves. His neighbor’s new truck. A pothole on his street that the county won’t fix.

When I hung up, I did something I’d been avoiding for a while. I did the math.

This whole week has been about reserves. Monday was cash, the money you set aside so the fog doesn’t take you down. Wednesday was capacity, the mornings you’re about to spend in Q4. Friday was the goodwill you bank with the people who pay you.

Today’s about the one reserve you can’t build. You can only spend it. And I’d like you to know how much you have left.

My father’s in his mid seventies. He’s in decent shape. He walks most mornings, complains about his knees, and still refuses to let anyone else carve the turkey.

I live a few hours away. If I’m honest, and this is the whole point of today, so I’m going to be honest, I see him about three times a year. Thanksgiving. Sometime in the summer. Maybe once more if there’s a reason.

If he’s got fifteen more good years, and I hope he does, that’s around forty-five more visits.

Forty-five.

Not forty-five years. Not forty-five months. Forty-five weekends, most of them two or three days long, most of them already crowded with other people, other plans, a game on in the background, and me checking my phone more than I’d want him to notice.

When I added it up, the number that came out was roughly a hundred and twenty days. That’s what I have left with my father, at the pace I’m currently going. About four months, spread across fifteen years.

I’ve spent longer than that on a single client engagement and not thought twice about it.

I’m not going to tell you what your number is. But I’d ask you to run it, today, on the back of whatever’s in front of you.

Take your parent’s age. Guess how many good years are left, and be honest rather than morbid. Multiply it by how many times a year you actually see them. Not how many times you intend to. How many times you did last year.

That’s your number.

For a lot of men reading this, it’s going to be smaller than you expected. Some of you are going to get a number in the single digits and have to sit with that for a minute. Take the minute.

And if both your parents are already gone, I know this one lands differently. Stay with me. There’s something here for you too, and I’ll get to it.

Here’s what I’ve figured out about myself, and I suspect it’s true for a lot of you.

We’re very good at the stuff that has a deadline. The client deliverable, the quarter close, the proposal due Friday. When there’s a clock, we move. That’s why we’re good at what we do.

The trouble is that the stuff that matters most in life doesn’t come with a visible clock. Your father doesn’t send you an invoice with net 30 terms. Your mother never schedules a meeting called “last chance.” The clock is running, it’s just running quietly in the background, and a man who’s trained himself to respond to loud clocks will ignore a quiet one for years.

So we push it. “I’ll go up after Q4.” “We’ll do a big trip next summer.” “Once things settle down.” Every single one of those is individually reasonable. Put fifteen years of them in a row and you’ve spent the whole reserve without ever deciding to.

Thanksgiving is about seven weeks away. Christmas is right after. For a lot of you, that’s one or two of the three visits you’ll get this year. So here’s what I’d ask you to think about before you walk in the door.

Be in the room. Not in the room with your phone. Not in the room while mentally drafting an email about a client who’ll still be there Monday. Actually in it. Put your phone in your bag or your car for the day. The world will keep spinning for six hours. I promise.

Ask better questions. Most visits with our parents run on the same loop. How’s work, how are the kids, how’s the weather, did you see the game. It’s comfortable, and comfortable isn’t bad, but you can get so much more.

Ask them things you’ve never asked:

That last one takes a little courage. Ask it anyway.

Record it. This is the one I wish someone had told me years ago. Ask if you can record the conversation on your phone. Just audio. Tell them you want to remember the stories. Most parents are flattered. And someday, maybe a long way from now, you’re going to want to hear that voice tell that story again. You’re going to want your kids to hear it. Right now, it costs you one tap.

Do something with them, not just near them. Watching the game together counts, but it’s not the same as working on something together. Fix the thing in the garage he’s been meaning to get to. Go for the walk she takes every morning. Cook the recipe together instead of just eating it. Men especially connect side by side, doing, more than face to face, talking. Use that.

I want to say something here, because I know not everybody reading this had a father like mine.

Some of you had a dad who wasn’t there. Some of you had one who was there and made you wish he wasn’t. Some of you have a mother you love and can’t spend more than an afternoon with before it turns into the same argument you’ve been having since 1994. I’m not going to pretend a phone call on Sunday fixes any of that.

This isn’t about obligation. You don’t owe anyone a visit because of a calendar. If the relationship is genuinely bad for you, protecting yourself is a decision a grown man is allowed to make, and nobody reading a newsletter gets to second guess it.

But I’ll offer this. A lot of the distance between men and their parents isn’t damage. It’s drift. It’s years of short calls and missed weekends that slowly turned into a relationship neither person chose. If that’s yours, the math still applies. Drift is fixable. It’s fixable one boring phone call at a time. The first one is the hardest, and it’s usually shorter and easier than you’ve been bracing for.

The visits are the big moments. But the reserve gets spent, or saved, in the small ones.

My father and I talk on the phone more than we used to. Not because I became a better son overnight. Because I put it on my calendar. Sunday afternoons, about four o’clock, recurring. Some weeks it’s five minutes. Some weeks it’s an hour. Some weeks he doesn’t pick up and I leave a voicemail about nothing. Doesn’t matter. The call exists.

I know how that sounds. Putting your father on your calendar like a client. But here’s what I’ve learned: the things that aren’t on the calendar don’t happen. That’s true in business and it turns out it’s true for this, too. There’s no shame in using the tools that work to protect the things that matter.

A few more that cost almost nothing:

For those of you who did the math and got zero, I’m sorry. I know that’s not a small thing to sit with on a Sunday morning.

But the reserve doesn’t disappear. It just moves.

There’s probably someone in your life who stood in for your father in some way. An uncle. A coach. The old man who hired you at nineteen and saw something in you before you saw it yourself. A mentor who’s now well into his eighties and doesn’t get as many calls as he used to. Run the math on him. Call him this week.

And then there’s the other direction.

If you’ve got kids at home, flip the math around. You don’t have unlimited summers with them either. The number of weekends before they leave for college, or a job, or a life of their own, is smaller than it feels when you’re in the middle of it. Somewhere down the road, they’re going to be running this same calculation about you. The only question is what the number feels like when they do.

I’ll tell you where I landed, and then I’ll leave you alone.

I booked a flight for a weekend in November, the one before Thanksgiving. Not for a holiday. Not for a reason. Just to go sit on my father’s porch and watch him complain about the pothole in person. I told him I was coming, and there was a long pause on the line, and then he said “well, what for?” And I said “no reason,” and he said “okay,” and I could hear him smiling.

Four visits this year instead of three. That’s one more visit out of the forty-five I’ve got left. It doesn’t sound like much. It’s two percent of the whole reserve.

I’ll take it.

No worksheet today. No keyword. Just one thing.

Run your number. Then pick up the phone before Sunday’s over and call whoever you did the math on. Don’t make it a big deal. Don’t announce anything. Ask them how their week was, and then actually listen to the answer.

If they want you to show them how to forward a text, let it take eleven minutes.

Refined. Relentless. Unapologetic.

Marcus