The story is simple. Since we live scattered across the United States, our grandmother’s funeral in 2005 was the first time we had all been in one place to be captured on film.

Although time has changed our hair and our lives, being miles apart remains a constant for us. Together again over Christmas break 2008, it seemed time for another photo.

These days we have our little tradition: get dressed up — which none of us ever do otherwise — to take the same photo whenever we are all together.

The Doke Brothers: Baron, Barrett, Brian and Evin.

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Barrett Doke is a teacher and photographer living in Houston.

Barrett is a guest writer and photographer for This Ordinary Day’s Sunday Specials. If you would like to participate in Sunday Specials, please click here.

I used to be scared of a lot of things. Stupid things. Not just death and global warming, but little things like fish, heights and my own capabilities operating a moving vehicle. I don’t know where these fears came from, but they were enough to quicken my heart rate when getting behind the wheel of a car or traveling up an escalator.

Then I moved to Africa.

So it was with great surprise that a few months ago I found myself submerged in a cage off the coast of the Western Cape of South Africa staring straight into the eye of a great white shark. I was floating in a part of the Atlantic Ocean known as “shark alley.” It’s the kind of place that features prominently on the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. Did I mention I had to sign a waiver promising not to sue if I ended up limbless from a shark attack? If ever there was a time to conquer my fear of fish, with one of the most vicious fish known to humanity, it was now. Luckily, I not only survived but I now count this experience as one of the most peaceful and harmonizing experiences of my life thus far.

I used to be so afraid of heights that even descending an escalator in a crowded mall was enough to make me panic. I don’t like to ride rollercoasters for the same reason. I once broke down in tears in Las Vegas after a friend convinced me to ride the slingshot at the top of the Stratosphere hotel. And forget about bungee jumping.

There’s no better way to cure this than finding the closest mountain and climbing to the top. I did this in Africa, repeatedly. I made it up Table Mountain, Cape Town’s iconic 3,500-plus foot landmark, and to the top of the Wolfberg Cracks stretching more than 5,000 feet into the Cederberg air. I didn’t hike Kilimanjaro, but for me these were BIG steps.

Next came letting go of my driving phobia. I guess my phobia wasn’t totally unfounded: shortly after getting my license I rammed my car into a light pole, narrowly missing driving directly through someone’s living room. This incident and a long list of speeding tickets was enough to elicit the slightest panic attack. No better way to conquer this fear than to face it, so I got my international driver’s license and arranged to lease a car in Africa. I figured learning to drive on the left-hand side of the road would be a challenge enough, but I got more than I bargained for. Driving in South Africa is like a real life game of Grand Theft Auto, except you can’t play again if you wipe out in a fiery mess on the N2. You not only contend with the country’s lax driving regulations but also the occasional baboon or broken fender that finds its way into the middle of the road. Not to mention the man who was driving with a giant whip out of his window I encountered during a vacation in Mozambique. Surely surviving this gauntlet would make me stronger and more fearless. And in some ways it did.

Yet something funny happened while I was busy putting a stop to these tiny, insignificant fears: I started living my life. I mean really living my life and not just going through the motions I had become all to comfortable with in my former sanitized existence. I realized how much of myself I’d let go into autopilot. Africa taught me better than that. I’ve coined a term for this type of living, for the new improved me: it’s called “possessing my present.” It’s waking up each day and completely embracing it. It’s not consulting my calendar and asking myself what I have to do that day; it’s asking myself what I want to do and then simply doing it with all the intensity I have in me. It’s the kind of behavior that led me to the tops of sand dunes in Namibia, to eating zebra and sipping homemade beer in local townships, to climbing 5,000-plus foot mountains in the Cederberg, to making new friends and building a lifetime of memories. It’s the kind of life I couldn’t ever have imagined for myself even just a year ago.

If it wasn’t the sharks or the baboons that taught me how to live a better life maybe it is the refugee family I met from Zimbabwe, who at just a year older than myself had already escaped political strife in their own country to take their daughter, stricken with cerebral palsy, to live in poverty in a new country that neither embraced nor recognized them. Their lives consist of sleeping on the ground outside of factories in hopes of sporadically working for a few U.S. dollars a week, of agonizing about how they will find medical assistance for their little girl or wondering when their supply of diapers or food will inevitably run out. These people are the very essence of fearlessness. They have taught me more than they will ever know about how to let go and to appreciate the life in front of me. Looking at them I realize I don’t have anything to fear…

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Courtney Hagen is a graduate of the University of Kansas who swapped her KU ID for a passport and moved to Africa after graduation. This fall she exchanged one beautiful place that starts with the letter “s” for another, when she left South Africa for graduate school in Scotland.

Courtney is a guest writer for This Ordinary Day. If you would like to be a guest writer, please click here.

I don’t really know when it started. Sometime after I read a short story about a girl inadvertently collecting toy ponies because she kept raising the idea to boyfriends and they kept buying them for her.

“Guess what I got you…”

“A pony?”

Or

“What would make this better?”

“A pony?”

It seemed like a pretty good line and I seem to have some sort of mild verbal OCD that requires me to pick up phrases, accents and other annoying things that people then tease me about every time I speak.

It’s only natural that my verbal tic would come out with my roommate since she has a pension for making fun of my other verbal oddnesses.

“Sam, I’m going to the store; what do you want?”

“Some milk, fruit, oh, and a pony.”

Before long I asked for a pony nearly every time we talked. Judging by my sent texts, Gmail chats and e-mails, I asked for a pony a lot.

Funny thing is, I never really got around to requesting a pony when my co-workers asked me what I wanted for lunch or when my mom asked what I wanted for Christmas.

No, I saved my outrageous request for Olivia.

Like the pony tic, I didn’t really want Olivia as a roommate when we first started out. Not that I didn’t want to live with her. She was fine, clean, nice and had been a good friend. But one of my closest friends in Houston was moving away and I was moving into her room and becoming Olivia’s roommate. Secretly, I wanted to move in with Laura.

But before long, her influence in my life was as constant as my requests for a pony. We shared meals together, worked out together, fought like two teenage sisters on a long car ride. Thanks to a really adorable puppy, we started nightly rituals of playing with the dog and talking in my room. Long after the dog graduated to sleeping in a crate downstairs, the nightly talks continued. My bed time continued to be ignored because of the chatter, jokes and analysis of our 20-something lives thus far.

Before long, I couldn’t stop myself from asking her for a pony. I think partly, because I know that if anyone would go out of her way to get me something as ludicrous as a pony, it’d be Olivia. That’s how she became more than a roommate, but a friend I’m finding it rather hard to live without. By listening to my ridiculous requests and issues and – most of the time – coming through for me.

So now Laura is back and Olivia is off to save lives in Africa. It’s a hard thing when you get what you wished for and then realize you want something entirely different than you originally thought. Maybe in life we ask for silly things like ponies or a million dollars because sometimes facing the facts that friends move on and follow their own dreams is hard to swallow.

I’ve been struggling since my return from Christmas vacation to find my balance again. I like order and I like to know the future. I find change that I create exhilarating and change that happens around me utterly unnerving.

I’m afraid I’ve done a bad job celebrating Olivia’s grand adventure because I’m heartsick to lose such a great roommate and wonderful friend. Sitting alone in my classroom today — dealing with a totally separate issue — I burst out crying. Frustrated and tired and annoyed with myself for not being able to just get on with life without the drama, I sat at my desk and gulped air down wondering what would make it all better. Then I realized.

A pony.

I wish for a pony because I’m wishing for the outlandish, the impossible. I’m wishing for my friends to stay the way they are in the exact spot I’ve carved out for them in my life and still be able to chase all their wild dreams at the exact same time. It’s much easier to ask for something I’m sure I will never get than to face a fifty-fifty shot that your friendship will survive, your relationship will prosper or you’ll get the job you’ve always dreamed of. Those are almost too real, too risky, but I can’t be disappointed by asking for a pony. I’m still asking for a pony because I could never ask Olivia (or Laura or Becka for that matter) to stop for a second chasing what they love. My request is a band-aid for the days like today when I just wish they were across the hallway from me instead of around the world.

I dried my tears and went on with my day. I get one more weekend to celebrate my friend. I’m not going spend any more of it crying. I’m going to stay up late talking and giving Liv a hard time about always looking at the negative side of life first. Then there will be chips and salsa. There are always chips and salsa. Hopefully, there will be movies and joking fights about judgment and tone of voice. I’m positive there will be laughter and sage advice.

And then I’m going to hug my friend and tell her to go out and do the amazing things I know she’s capable of. I’m going to make her promise to put herself first once in a while and give herself more credit for her bravery, heart and beauty. I’m going to remind her that I may be the one with the busy social calendar, but my life feels much more empty without her in it.

And then I’m going to ask for a pony.

I’m not in the habit of making “year-end review” lists. There’s rarely a year I find so personally important that it must be rehashed. However, that is changing for the time being. That’s because, in the scheme of things, there are a handful of years in life that a person should probably remember.

In 1984, I was born. That’s a date you just can’t forget.

In 1992, my first dog died. That stands out to a young boy.

In 2003, I graduated from high school.

And in 2008, I became a grownup.

Technically, I was an adult when I turned 18 in 2002. But see, I had to do the math on that. Eighteen plus the aforementioned year of birth….it’s not automatic. Aside from the fact that I was legal according to the State of Kansas, nothing else memorable happened. The same goes for 2005, the year I turned 21. If anything, I have trouble piecing together what all took place in those first few months of legal libation. If anyone has photographic evidence of anything I did from September 2005 to approximately May 2006, personal message me so I can get a reminder before I destroy the evidence.

But 2008 is one of those years I think will always stick out in my mind. It’s a year that won’t require me to subtract 1984, carry the two, or try to remember where I was living.

It’s just there.

For the first time in my post-toddler life, I wasn’t a student at all. It was the year I went out, got a job, got an apartment, and got a commute. I was hired on New Years Eve and fired before the Fourth of July. I got a pink slip, a cardboard box and a few weeks off. After that was over, I got a new job, a raise and a fresh start. I became a “big kid” in the unkindest way. It was a not-so-welcome to the real world (the lowercase, much less fun version — not the apocalyptic, sexually charged and aneurysm-inducing MTV version) that left my head spinning. Even as a student who balanced my own share of responsibilities during my college career, the “carefree” days of being a student seemed so distant they may as well have not existed in the first place.

The summer was mostly a fog of financial distress. Big bills from the dentist and mechanic came in the fall, and winter didn’t do much to ease it. A friend asked me a few weeks ago if I feel more cynical these days than I did before I left college. She was looking for someone who could relate, and boy, could I relate. At times it seems that life is not a whole lot more than working a job so you can pay the bills, making the most of your days just to get to a weekend.

I’ve discovered in 12 short months that being a grownup is hard. Some days I wish I didn’t have to do it. I wish that I could stay in my pajamas and play video games and get dressed only to go have drinks with friends and then sleep in again the next day.

So some days I do that. It’s a gentle reminder that, yeah, I’m an adult and life’s rough, but it’s also pretty cool. There’s freedom and experience that you don’t get as a kid or a teenager or even a college student living off of your parents’ generosity and a “job” at the campus newspaper. There’s something exciting about looking at the life around you and knowing that you’re building it yourself and you’ve got a little bit of control over how it looks.

So that’s it. 2008 is over. Gone. Dead. Just another set of numbers that will stand out for a while and then fade with time. So you remember it for what it was (stressful, humbling, full of small surprises) and what it wasn’t (a total disaster, the end of the world, my last year on Earth) and hopefully you can find something in there that makes it all worthwhile.

I’ve been feeling drained the last few days. Thinking I had so much time thanks to the long holiday, I made an extensive to-do list of everything I wanted to accomplish. Somehow I wound up staying up late, getting up early and subsisting on coffee to keep me alert in between, all the while only getting to half of what I wanted.

When Monday rolled back around after four days off work, I sprawled on my bed, dreading the return to routine. An hour into work I was already counting down til lunch. I was restless and had trouble focusing until we could leave at 6 p.m. I was having vacation withdrawal and knew of no way to fix it.

On the subway ride home — tired, with a headache and stomachache, still unsure of what I’d write about for this deadline — I considered it highly likely that the baby being held next to me could spew on me at any moment, and that I had run out of ordinary moments to write about.

I watched the woman across from me as she text messaged. Sometimes I forget that people can see me watching them and I stare for longer than is socially acceptable. This woman didn’t seem to mind, and I couldn’t turn away because she made exaggerated faces in response to the messages. And she talked to herself. She was just asking to be stared at.

Then she called someone and used the word “emergency.” I couldn’t hear her conversation very well — the conductor was announcing that we were stalled because of train traffic ahead — but her face looked serious. We made it to the next station where baby, his parents and his toddler brother got off. Before the toddler left though, he walked over to the cell phone woman and waved goodbye. She smiled and waved back.

And in the moment, my headache went away. My stomach stopped hurting. And I stopped missing vacation. In that moment, I smiled too, and hoped that everything would be OK.

I was watching the Fiesta Bowl the other night, and the Texas Longhorns won on a last-minute drive, beating the Ohio State Buckeyes.

After the game, several Longhorns gave credit to one guy for their victory. Without this dude, they said they wouldn’t have been able to win the game. Apparently, they wouldn’t have even been there if it wasn’t for him.

So, who could it have been?

The bus driver?

Nope. They needed him to get to the game, and probably wouldn’t have been there without him, but he didn’t get any credit.

Their moms? Remember, I said it was a dude – at least I think it’s a dude – so that’s not right. Although their moms definitely helped get them to this point by providing good genes, most likely some support along the way, and birth, which is key.

How about their coaches?

The coaches did put the team together and helped develop a game plan that was good enough to just barely beat the Buckeyes, but, according to the Texas players, their coaches didn’t deserve all the credit.

Some of these folks were mentioned in a couple of the postgame interviews. Some players even gave credit to their coaches and family, but apparently, the man behind the Longhorns’ success was a higher power.

That’s right. I didn’t know, but apparently God is a Longhorns’ fan. And here I thought he was a Jayhawk fan this whole time.

As a sportswriter, I’ve found the Big Guy comes up quite a bit in postgame interviews. Either he’s a big player in Vegas or a fan of a lot of different teams because it seems like everybody thinks he’s on their side.

Usually when a player starts to take the interview in a religious direction, I put down the tape recorder, wait until it’s over and then ask a question that I know will not evoke a God-ridden answer.

“Why did you drop that pass?” usually works.

Strangely enough, “It must have been the devil,” is not a common response.

If I was deemed a supreme sports being, I think my first order of business would be a separation of church and sports. I have this inkling that the Big Guy has more important matters to attend to other than sports.

Sports are a great outlet for us to get away from more important things in life and to feel part of a group. Religion is also a good way to feel part of a group, but the two should not mix.

And if God really was a Longhorns’ fan, wouldn’t he have changed the BCS by now? He must not listen to us sportswriters much.