Some Things Stay With You

The Work Was Never Just Work

I’m not sure if it’s being in my fifties or just a season of reflection, but lately I’ve found myself drifting back more and more. Not just remembering things, but feeling them again.

Recently I wrote about my first job as a dishwasher at the local greasy spoon. What I don’t think I fully captured was how much fun that job actually was. Not the job itself. Let’s be honest, it was dishes. But everything around it. The people, the constant noise, the inside jokes that made no sense to anyone outside those walls, the kind of laughs that just showed up out of nowhere and stuck with you longer than they should have.

Those are the things that stayed. And maybe more importantly, those are the things that mattered, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

Fast Forward to This Week

This week, I was at my desk building out a new website, same work, different moment. Clean layout, structured content, modern everything. But it needed placeholder images, and if you’re going to use placeholder images, you might as well have some fun with it.

So naturally, I dropped the site owner into full Magnum P.I. gear, standing in front of that iconic Ferrari. Because why not. Then I added an X-Wing. Again, why not. Somewhere along the way, work stopped feeling like work. It felt like messing around again, like being back in that kitchen, except now the tools are different.

And Then… the Blazer Showed Up

But one of the placeholders hit a little different. A 1985 Chevy Blazer. Black. Red interior. Stick shift.

And that one wasn’t just an image.

That was mine.

The first car I bought with money from that restaurant job. The car that carried me through high school, through college, and into my first job after. It wasn’t flashy, but it was everything. Reliable, a little rough around the edges, and somehow always ready for whatever came next.

It was also the car Karen and I packed everything we owned into when we left college life behind. Every box, every unknown, every bit of excitement and uncertainty loaded into the back, pointing it forward toward whatever that next chapter was going to be.

That Blazer wasn’t just transportation.

It was a bridge.

What We Miss Isn’t Always What We Think

It’s easy to say we miss “the old days,” but I don’t think that’s really it. We miss how things felt. We miss when work and fun weren’t separated, when you didn’t overthink everything, when you could just be in it.

But more than anything…

We miss the people.

I miss my restaurant people. The ones who made long shifts feel short, who made nothing feel like something, who turned a job into a story I still carry with me.

But here’s the part I didn’t expect.

I have that again.

Just in a different way.

Now it’s my client people. The conversations, the laughs about work, the laughs about life, the laughs about dumb stuff that has nothing to do with either. The kind of moments where you catch yourself laughing at yourself, at each other, and realizing this is the part that actually matters.

That dishwasher job wasn’t special because of what I was doing. It was special because of who I was doing it with.

And sitting here years later, dropping an X-Wing into a client website and laughing to myself, I realized something.

That version of me didn’t go anywhere.

Maybe That’s the Real Shift

Maybe this stage of life isn’t about slowing down. Maybe it’s about remembering what made things feel alive in the first place and finding ways to bring that back into what we do now. Not by going backwards, but by carrying the best parts forward.

Because if I can feel even a fraction of that same energy while building a website…

Then maybe work was never the thing that changed.

Maybe I just forgot how to play.