Back in August, I started thinking about what it meant to hit bottom. I was walking into a Wendy’s just off of Highway 435 in Kansas City with an armful of my belongings, after watching my car be loaded onto a tow truck for the second time in less than two months. I was fresh off a temper tantrum that began with my car overheating, progressed to me punching the ground in frustration, and ended with my even-tempered girlfriend convincing me that things would be OK. I had hit an impressive string of unforeseen expenses and general misfortune. Walking into the restaurant with my ego shaken and my financial future seemingly in shambles, a question occurred to me:

“At what point does it stop being bad luck and start being something else?”

It’s not just now, months later having had the chance to reflect, that I realize how pathetic that sounds. As soon as the thought entered my mind, I tried to push it out. It was exactly the sort of sad negativity I don’t normally carry around. And yet…there it was.

I couldn’t let it all sink in yet, because I stopped to hold the door for an elderly couple on their way out of the restaurant. My mind was somewhere else, so I’m sure I looked distracted when the man asked me if I lived nearby.

“No, not really,” I told him, thinking he needed directions. “What are you looking for?”

“Well, we’d be happy to give you a ride if you needed one,” he said.

You know that part in movies where the bad guy suddenly realizes that he’s reached the end of the line and his misdeeds have finally caught up to him? That was me, as I was interrupted in the middle of my own little pity party. Here was this couple, owing me nothing, offering me a bit of help in a moment when I needed nothing more than some human compassion. And there it was.

A few weeks later, and in my car (which, as it turned out, only needed a new water pump) on my way to work, I realized I needed gas and soon. I felt for my wallet before I pulled into a station and realized I didn’t have it. It was exceptionally odd, because I’m a fairly systematic person. Each night, I put my bag, coat, wallet and keys in the exact same place so I won’t forget any of it as I rush out in the morning. Somehow, on this particular day, I’d left the wallet sitting in its spot while I hurried off to work.

This wasn’t a “kind of need gas, but I can wait until I get home” day. It was a “I need to put something in this car’s tank or I’m not making it home” day. So I dug through the coins I had and managed two full dollars worth of quarters. Fantastic. The only obstacle now was that I had to stop in one of Kansas City’s…uh…rougher neighborhoods. But I was desperate, so I turned down my internal voice of reason and ducked into the station to pre-pay my 200 cents.

I was standing in line, counting out the eight coins to be sure when I heard someone directly behind me ask, “Hey, what are you doing in my neighborhood?”

When I told this story to friends later, they all asked if I thought I was getting robbed. Honestly, I didn’t. There wasn’t enough time to compile the data (which, had there been, I would have come to the conclusion that I was being robbed). Instead, I looked up and saw the familiar face of my junior high friend and college roommate, Ryan.

“What the hell? What are you doing here?” I asked him, convinced I was in some kind of Twilight Zone moment. None of it made any sense: me being without my wallet, being in this neighborhood on this day and him being there, too.

“What the hell are YOU doing here?” he shot back.

I told him the story, declined his offer to buy me a tank of gas and told him I’d go straight home to get my wallet. He left and I got back in line. There was only one person in front of me and I readied my quarters. The customer in front of me finished and I stepped up, but he stopped me. He was holding two $1 bills.

“Here you go,” he said. “I hope this helps.”

A minute earlier, I would have pictured this man more likely to ask me for money than to give it to me. I tried to decline, but he insisted.

“I hope it helps,” he repeated, and walked out.

So much had to happen for the whole situation to happen the way it did. I needed to forget my wallet, I needed to miss a turn into the previous gas station I had meant to go to, I needed my friend to be in the parking lot at that exact moment, and I needed the generous man in front of me to hear the story. No matter how many times I run it through my head, I can’t force it to make sense. It’s just too many coincidences. I’m not saying it was any kind of supreme message or anything, but I’ll say this: when I’m the age of the couple who offered me a ride home, I likely won’t remember why I felt so desperate on a day of car trouble, but I’ll remember that their offer of a ride made me feel a lot better and changed my perspective, and there’s no way I’ll ever forget about the day I forgot my wallet.

Editor’s note: for the next two weeks we’ll be running the best of our This Ordinary Day pieces. We’ve enjoyed working with so many great writers and wonderful people and felt it was high time to take a look back at some of what they’ve brought us. If you’d like to see more pieces, please take a trip over to our archives page — it’ll be well worth your time.

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My grandpa is awesome. Ten things you should know about him:

1. His name is Ennis Hugh (or E.H.) but nobody knows him as such. Ask anyone in tiny Elkhart, Kansas (population: 2,200), and they’ll say, yes, of course they know Shorty McCarter. He’s almost certainly fixed a sink, a driveway or built an addition to the house of just about everyone in town, all without any of them knowing that “Shorty” isn’t his God-given name. Nobody knows how it got started, but it stuck. He introduces himself as Shorty, he answers his phone as Shorty and his private contracting business is operated under the title of E.H. “Shorty” McCarter.

Bonus fact: Shorty despises the name Ennis with the sort of venom that most people hold back for terrorism, taxes or childhood bullies. Nobody knows why.

2. He met my grandma playing pinball when they were 17. How sickeningly sweet of a cliché is that? And to top it off, she beat him and he fell in love. I grew up reciting that story. Now that I know what I know about teenagers (despite the era) I’m convinced it was probably not as innocent as it sounds, but I’ll keep the charade going. They met playing pinball. She beat him and he fell in love. Nice story.

3. From his five kids, he has12 grandkids and, to this point, eight great-grandkids. They all call him Papa Shorty. And every one of them feels special every time they see him. He’s always had this way of sounding pleasantly surprised when one of us calls him that makes us feel like we’re each his favorite. He’s always found small ways of surprising us individually — doing nice things that we’re convinced he doesn’t do for the others. Each of us thinks we’re his favorite, and I’m pretty sure we’re all right.

4. He’s spent all but a handful of his 84 years living in the southwest Kansas, Oklahoma/Texas panhandle area. Those few years were on the West Coast, which I’ll explain later. He defines that area and that area defines him. He’s never been a man who needs a lot to get by, and high society is lost on him, a trait I adore. He’s not country, but he fits in a small town. He’s the type of person that everyone in town knows, respects and depends on. If he’s done any work on your house in the last 20 years and you have a problem, you can call him any time of day and he’ll be there to fix it. For most of my life, I’ve walked into hardware stores, cafes and grocery stores and seen first-hand the sort of clout he carries in a town where hard work and loyalty still means something.

5. He’s a hardcore baseball fan. He’s kept a running baseball bet with my Uncle Kent since the mid-70s, and neither of them are sure who’s winning. His favorite sports teams are the San Diego Padres, Atlanta Braves and Green Bay Packers. His favorite athletes of all-time are Fran Tarkenton, Brett Favre and Greg Maddux. He respects toughness above all else, and he’s not afraid to pull for an underdog. His prowess as a sports fan in general heavily influenced the way I’ve watched sports and cheered for teams. He says Maddux is the best athlete he ever saw.

6. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War in the 1950s, but up until two years ago, had never talked about his service to anyone in my family. He wasn’t ashamed of anything he had done, and he wasn’t scarred by the experience. Most of his service was uneventful sailing and he didn’t see a lot of conflict, but he lost a few friends and always considered himself lucky to make it back. He never saw the point of talking about it — it was a responsibility he had, and he performed his duty. End of story. He spent almost three years away from his family and wife, Fayetta, and the sense of community he felt while he was stationed in San Diego is what makes him a Padres fan today. He’s never forgotten that, even though he hasn’t been back since.

7. He stopped smoking the day he learned his oldest child, my mom, was pregnant with my sister, making him a grandfather for the first time. In exchange, I never started. Well, there were lots of reasons for that, but his dedication to stop helped me make up my mind. It’s a small choice in life, the decision not to smoke, and I don’t look down on anyone who does, but when someone you grow up admiring does or doesn’t do something, it makes you want to do the same. More than the decision not to smoke, I think his action inspired me more to value the well-being of family more than anything else.

8. He retired from a natural gas company in the 1980s and started a business doing the thing he had always been best at: building and fixing things. The man can fix anything. He can drive around Elkhart tell all sorts of stories about who has lived where, what they did for a living and where their kids live now. Between the time I was four and 14, my favorite place to be was out on a job site “working” with Papa Shorty. Of course, that mostly consisted of keeping myself busy cleaning up supplies, exploring the area or occasionally helping out by measuring boards for him. As I got older, he gave me a little more responsibility, but never more than I wanted. Being out there with him was never about work, but about having an OK time and keeping him company.

The summer after I graduated from high school, I went to work for him as an actual employee. He treated me as such. Told me what to do, got mad at me when I messed something up, and didn’t talk to me any differently than any of the other workers. The only difference was that at the end of the day, I was the only one he was talking to when he’d walk over and say, “How about dinner?”

Now I wish that after a hard day, or when things aren’t going great, I could go out to a job site and help him in whatever way he needs it.

9. He’s still as awesome as ever. I went out to Elkhart for Thanksgiving and I took my niece and nephew out to his job site. He worked in a bitterly cold storage shed that was 5 miles away from anything else, wiring a 30-foot garage door. I was proud and a little ashamed that it was something I couldn’t have done in a million years, and yet there he was, at his age, getting it done.

10. He’s my idol. In that summer that I worked for him, he taught me a tough lesson about manual labor and what it means to work hard. He told me at the end of the summer that he hoped I would never want to go back and work for him. I knew then and I know now that he didn’t mean it as a slight against my abilities or my work ethic; he just wanted to see me get through with school and make something of myself.

Occasionally I feel guilty about the fact that I went to college and got a desk job in academia. It’s so far removed from the blue-collar roots my grandpa raised me from. But anytime I start to think anything like that, I think of how proud of me I know my hero is, and that keeps me going.

Whatever his motivation is, he keeps his priorities in line. When my grandma got sick and needed to relocate for dialysis treatments, my grandpa began commuting two hours each day to keep his business afloat. He took care of her every need and never complained. He put family first, and continues to do so now that she’s been gone for 10 years. It’s the little things that make the difference. For example, there’s nothing he’ll ever be able to tell me that will make me believe that the excuse he used the day after Thanksgiving this year, that he needed to run to town to get some parts, was legit. He could tell his great-grandkids were getting bored and were ready to go home. With a fake look of disgust that I recognized from my own childhood, he came down from his ladder in the freezing shed and asked us an old familiar question:

“How about dinner?”

I’ve always sworn, I’ll never be THAT parent.

You know, the one at the baseball game/school musical/piano recital who just can’t seem to keep their thoughts to themselves. The one who screams at their kid, either in support and in criticism. The one who, in their own mind, probably sounds completely normal while everyone around them is shooting each other “Who the hell is this guy?” looks.

I’ll never be that parent.

Years before I have a child of my own and plenty more before that child will have any sort of public performance, I’m at my nephew’s football game a few weeks ago and I’m suddenly THAT parent — err, uncle. It only lasts for a moment, an excited, almost unconscious moment, and then I’m back to being my calm-headed self.

A little context: My nephew turns nine tomorrow. This is a shocking statistic to me. It’s shocking because I remember being nine. Nine doesn’t seem all that long ago. There’s no…way…he’s already that old. To me he’s still an infant, a toddler, up and walking then up and running. He’s on his first t-ball team, he has his own room and he’s off to school. But nine? And playing tackle football? It’s almost too much to believe.

I’ve always felt a very close bond with my nephew. I had no younger siblings and when my sister unexpectedly told me she was expecting, there was no plan for a man in the life of her son. So there I was, a senior in high school with this newborn boy who felt something like a stranger, something like a little brother and eventually something like a nephew. We grew up together with one common connection: I was once a little boy and was still enough to remember what was awesome. Namely, sports.

I put a ball in his hand he threw it back. We’ve been doing approximately the same thing for the last eight or so years.

I taught him to put a spiral on a football and where the sweet spot is on a baseball bat. I was away at college while my dad taught him to ride a bike, but during my summer at home, we spent every minute available pitching and catching, hitting and running, ducking and tagging. The thing was, he didn’t care or even need to know that I’m no all-star athlete. I played football until it stopped being fun (seventh grade) and baseball until a few years past its entertainment expiration, unfortunately (high school). For him, it’s always been enough that I knew the rules, knew the fundamentals and was willing to play with him.

I think it’s reasonable to say my first experience watching him play full-contact, pads-hitting-pads football came with some nerves. I was just excited to see him suited up. Yellow pants, power blue jersey, white helmet that made his neck look like it was supporting a bowling ball. It may as well have been.

The first few plays were uneventful. He played running back and outside linebacker, almost exactly the same positions I played at his age. He was fast, always in position, but hesitant to actually make a play — just like I had been. It was a perfect situation, really. I didn’t need to see him excel; I just needed to see him there, playing. I needed to see all of those hours and days and years we’d spent together turned into something.

Suddenly, coming out of halftime, something became something big. He had the ball. He was toward the sideline, bobbling the ball for a moment then adjusting it on his hip. He was turning upfield and heading down the sideline. He was…gone. It happened in what truly was a split second. I was jumping up and down in place, screaming his name. Screaming “Yes!” and “Go!” and I’m sure a few other things I don’t remember. It was the most excited I’ve ever watching any sporting event, live or televised.

He was gone.

He was…almost gone.

One kid I hadn’t seen came from nowhere, dove and tripped him up just a few steps from his first touchdown. I’ve run it through my head 100 times since then. If that kid misses, my nephew scores. His team maybe wins. I can just imagine the beaming smile he would have worn, if only that kid misses. If only that kid misses, my nephew doesn’t lay on the ground after the play for what seems like forever. He doesn’t have his coaches help him to his feet while tears run down his face and he doesn’t spend the rest of the game on the sideline.

If that kid misses, my nephew doesn’t break his collarbone and isn’t in a sling on his 9th birthday.

I’m trying to see the positive in the way it all worked out, since the kid didn’t miss. See, I love that my nephew plays sports because I love the lessons that sports can teach. Team play, hard work, perseverance. What lesson does a 9-year-old learn from a broken collarbone five yards short of a touchdown? Toughness, I suppose — but he’s 9. He could have learned toughness from having the wind knocked out of him.

The best I can come up with at the moment is that I’m the one who learned from this experience. It wasn’t anything new to me, but a reinforcement of something I already thought I knew: I don’t want to be that parent. I don’t want to be that parent because that parent doesn’t leave the yelling at the game or the recital or the school play. That parent puts too much emphasis on sports or on piano or dance or whatever.

One minute, I saw all of the work and practice I had spent with my nephew turned into one of the most exciting moments of my life. The next, the basis of everything we’ve always had in common was hanging in the balance. I considered everything.

What if this causes lifelong pain?

What if he doesn’t want to play sports again?

Those first two are extreme, I know, but the thought of them broke my heart. I guess you just never want to see a loved one forced into anything. If he never wants to play football again, I can’t say I blame him. It might even relieve me a little. But as long as he has a choice, that’s enough for me.

Now, I just want one thing: I want that damn kid to miss the tackle so I can see a touchdown.

I’ve never seen Big Brother. I watched the first episode of the first season of Survivor, and my only experience with American Idol was my mom and sister forcing me to watch during a visit home a few years ago. None of which is to say I’m not a TV person — I most definitely am a true-blooded American in the respect that the first thing I do when I come home at night is flip on the tube. When I’m making dinner? TV’s on. When I wake up on a Saturday morning? Let’s see what’s on. Often sports are my entertainment of choice, but I’m also quite satisfied with a bad movie here and there.

I don’t know if I’m missing out on some sort of cultural significance by skipping the more popular shows. While I may not be up-to-date with what qualifies as “Must See TV” (do they still call it that?) it occurred to me recently that I’ve still got a set of trusty fallbacks I know I can always count on to kill my brain cells in bulk.

For the past year, I’ve worked a compressed week — Tuesday through Friday. When I found out a few weeks ago that we would be going back to a five-day week, one of my first thoughts went something like this: How am I going to watch The Price is Right, followed immediately by Full House? It was a scary thought. I’ve become quite addicted to these shows that formed a large part of my childhood. Watching them as a 20-something should feel more…pathetic…but somehow it doesn’t, and I think I know why.

There’s a comforting notion about a cast of characters that you know inside and out. There’s something empowering about a storyline you’ve seen either once, twice or a million times before — so many times you know what happens next whether it’s the pilot, the third episode of the 8th season or the series finale. I’m that way with a number of shows. Within a few lines, I’m usually able to point out what happens in this episode of Seinfeld or Friends; I know the complicated back story of the show that ultimately became Saved by the Bell.

In fact, I love these shows so genuinely that I’m able to look past their flaws.

Of course Saved by the Bell started in Indiana as Good Morning Miss Bliss, then shifted to California. The cast grew up, graduated, mysteriously returned for another year of high school — and then went off to college at California University even though Zack had qualified for Yale with his 1502 ACT score.

I’m also at the age where I most of my favorites were originally seen in syndication, so my idea of timeline is completely screwed up. Until recently, I’d never see the last episode of The Cosby Show. Thank God for YouTube. My favorite series conclusion was The Wonder Years — one of the few shows that got it right and didn’t leave anything for speculation. One of my all-time favorite series, Roseanne, also has one of my all-time least favorite endings. It was all a dream? Really? Wow, talk about depressing.

I don’t know what this will all mean in 30 years. Will I still remember? If so, will I care? Surely the people around me won’t, so I’ll be left with my own memories of characters, people I felt like I knew. I’m OK with that. Until Nick at Night replaces MY shows with American Idol and Survivor, I guess. Then I’ll have to go out and, I don’t know, live in the real world.

Do you ever think about the little things, the details that make up the decisions, actions and reactions in our life? Do you ever wonder how so many tiny, insignificant occurrences can be the ones that ultimately shape who we become?

Example: My girlfriend and I started dating after a party during our senior year of college. We’d known each other all semester, admired one another from afar but never talked much one-on-one before that night. The thing is, I almost didn’t go to the party at all.

It was the end of the semester and I had my last class the following morning. I had to be in attendance or I was forfeiting my credits for the course. At the last moment, I decided I’d go but I wouldn’t stay long. Long story short, we ended up talking until morning, though neither of us knew what it meant at the time. We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together, and the fact that we same so close to missing out on all of it is humbling.

Example: My current job is the result of two things: a conversation I had with a co-worker at my previous job and a layoff about a month after the conversation. Both the conversation and the layoff almost didn’t happen.

We were on our way back from a story assignment, one that had been rescheduled twice and had nearly been canceled altogether. Save for a last-ditch effort to make the story happen, we never would have been in my car driving back that day, discussing his wife’s job. Two months later, his wife was interviewing me to be her co-worker.

Why was I being interviewed? Because a few weeks after that conversation, I was laid off as part of a staff reduction at our newspaper. The company needed to lose two employees, and they had no preference. We were all given a week to decide whether we would take a severance package and leave the newsroom. If they didn’t get two volunteers, they would start with the shortest length of tenure. Um, “Calling the kid straight out of college…you’re fired.” One co-worker knew immediately that she would take the package, but it wasn’t until the day before decisions had to be made that I knew someone else was considering it.

“Take it, take it!” I secretly willed him. He was a friend and I liked him, but I was desperate to stay in work. Eventually he decided he had a new family to support and he had to stick around. I respected that, but still got cut. A month later I was in my new position, and six months after that he was laid off anyway. Neither of us had any idea at the time how much uglier the industry was about to get. He’s still struggling to find the right fit and I just passed my first anniversary with my current employer. I’ve felt guilty ever since about the way it transpired, but I can’t avoid the fact that a lot of small stars aligned to lead my life’s path.

More than just the guilt, one has to wonder how things might have been different, good or bad, if just a detail here and a mindless decision there had been made otherwise. It can become too much if you let it.

The small things are what this blog is all about at its core. I’ve written so much in the past year about the way things have been in my past, while so much of my life is thinking about what’s here and now and what’s to come. If I’ve learned anything along the way, it should probably be that I can fret about the past and plan for the future all I want, but none of it will mean anything if the Chinese food I ate for lunch today somehow becomes the catalyst for the life I’ll be leading in 30 years. As frustrating as that might be, it’s also pretty damn comforting. Something about just going out there, doing what we do and seeing where it ends up sounds nice, even if it means giving up control.

I went home this weekend. Home, home. As in, hometown home. I’ve been officially away for six years now, although I make it back two or three times per year to visit family. Each time I’m back, I spend at least half an hour driving aimlessly, checking to see what’s changed and what hasn’t. There’s really no feeling like that, as far as I’ve found. It’s a little like being struck with a light case of temporary amnesia: You see all the pieces of the puzzle and certain things stand out as meaningful, but minor details have been changed just enough that you wonder whether it’s always been this way and your memory is mistaken, or if it’s been changed.

I have an unofficial checklist of areas I pay special attention to: friends’ houses, my high school, the park down the street from the house where I spent my entire childhood. For the most part, it all tends to look familiar but not unchanged. There’s a Walgreen’s where the fire department used to stand. The First National Bank is now City Hall. They’ve leveled my best friend’s home and put up a strip mall. OK, that one didn’t actually happen, but so much as a color change can feel that way.

Up until my latest visit, my own neighborhood had remained mostly untouched. Only a handful of families remain from the time I lived there, but the houses had been left almost exactly as I remembered them. This time, though, my own house was in the midst of a major overhaul, and I could hardly stand to look.

The tree in the front yard is gone. The one I helped plant when I was about 6 years old. My dad and uncles spent an entire weekend removing a dead sycamore before we planted this new maple in the same spot. There are pictures of me in a lime green Nike windbreaker, standing up to my neck in the hole where the sycamore had once lived. And now the new residents have taken out the tree I remember putting in. That’s just the beginning.

The cement driveway my grandpa put down in the mid-90s was freshly mutilated, most of it still sitting in a trailer on the street. As I drove through the neighborhood, I thought about putting the car in park, grabbing a chunk of it, and driving off like nothing had happened.

With the driveway went the basketball goal, the one that was there when my family moved in and outdated before I was even able to dribble a ball. It was tall and white, with a wooden backboard and a rim set permanently at 10 feet. The goal was inflexible, uncool and probably the reason I suck at basketball. What kid can learn to properly shoot hoops on a rim of that height? Still, I hated to see it gone.

The last thing I noticed before I had to drive away was the front door. It stood wide open, and I could see the family inside working away at what looked like a renovation. It was the family who bought the house when we moved out, and I’m sure they’ve changed more than I’d care to imagine in the past six years. But there was something about this particular time, the fact that I could actually see into their home, that really shook me. In just a couple of years, it will have been a decade since my family moved out and they will have never known or cared what the house looks like in my memory. That’s an awful feeling. I drove off wishing I had taken more pictures before we left, so I could verify that the house I remember and the house I love was the way I remember it to have been. Bitter? I guess. Homesick? Oh yeah.