Super Bowl Sunday

Super Bowl Sunday, 2020. Michigan, in February, and it was weirdly nice out.

If you've lived a Michigan February you know how rare that is. February is the month you forget the sun has a job. But that Sunday came in warm, so everybody was outside. People up and down the street were in their yards, not doing much of anything, just out.

I was inside with Carol.

I looked out and there were two cop cars coming up our driveway.

I walked out. They told me they had a warrant for my arrest.

I've spent a few weeks building up to this. Forty-seven lessons on my forty-seventh birthday. A fair warning about what telling the truth was going to cost. A prologue promising real, raw, and uncut.

Today I stop building up to it.

Season 1 is called The Fall and I'm starting at the top of it. But one thing first, because it changes how you should read everything after.

So, the check.

A client paid me for work I did. Real work, real invoice, services rendered. They sent the payment by FedEx. I deposited it, the way you deposit a check when somebody pays you for a job.

The check was stolen. I didn't know that. I had no way to know it. Somebody hands you a check for work you completed and you take it to the bank, and if you run a business you do that fifty times a year without thinking about it once.

I'll say that once and move on, because I know how it sounds when a man spends an hour explaining why it wasn't really his fault. I'm not being that guy.

But the rest of it is mine.

I took a plea for it. I didn't tell my wife I took it. I let a sentencing date come and go. I sat on a bench warrant for ten months and took my family on four vacations while it was out there.

Nobody made me do any of that. It's a long enough ledger that I don't need to pad it with a crime I didn't commit.

So no, I'm not the victim of this story. I was a victim of one thing, on one afternoon, when an envelope showed up. Everything after that I did with my own two hands.

Two months before any of this, a detective called me about the check.

He asked what I knew. I told him, and it took about ninety seconds. A client paid me for work, I did the job, and I can send you the invoice and everything we produced.

And I did. I put the whole thing together and sent it over.

Then nothing. No follow up, no call, no letter. Two months of nothing.

I made the wrong thing of that silence. I decided it was over.

Which is what a reasonable person does with silence. Somebody asks a question, you answer it completely, you hand over the paperwork, and they go away. So you assume the answer was good enough and the file closed. Not naive. It's how every other part of adult life works.

Silence isn't an answer. It means somebody is still working and you're not in the room while they do it.

If anybody had called me in January and said this is still open, come talk to us, I'd have driven down that afternoon. I had nothing to hide and a folder full of proof that I did the work.

Nobody called. The next contact I had about that check was two cars in my driveway.

Two or three hours in a holding cell. A bench, a toilet, me. That's the room.

And they didn't tell me the charges.

So you build. Best case, worst case, back and forth like a guy channel surfing at three in the morning. You draft the conversation with your wife about nine different ways.

They let me out on bond. The next day I drove to the sheriff's office to pay my own booking fee and find out what I'd been charged with.

They didn't give me anything.

Not out of meanness. Nobody was a jerk about it. The system is a set of processes, and the process that tells you what you did runs on its own clock, and that clock isn't built around your peace of mind.

So I walked back to my car with a receipt and no answer.

First thing I learned and then spent two years not learning: the system doesn't owe you closure. There's no form that says I'd like to know now, please, because the not knowing is eating me alive. You wait.

That week was hell, and nothing happened. Those go together.

I got up, went to work, came home, ate dinner. And there was a process running in the back of my head the whole time that never finished and never shut off.

Not knowing isn't the same as bad news. Bad news is awful but it's finite, it gives you something to stand on. Not knowing gives you nothing, so every possibility stays alive at once and your head just cycles.

And you can't tell anybody how loud it is, because from the outside you look completely fine.

Something I didn't expect. Once this happens, every ordinary conversation becomes a decision.

Somebody asks how was your weekend. That's a fork now. You can lie outright, which most people won't do cold. You can tell the truth, which you're not doing to a guy asking about your weekend. Or you do what I did, which is say fine, good, quiet one, and move it along.

That third one feels like nothing. Nobody would call it lying.

You do it eleven times a day.

By the end of that first week I'd said some version of everything's fine to maybe fifty people, and not one of those was a lie I'd have been ashamed of on its own, and together they were the first coat of paint on something I'd spend two years maintaining.

I don't have a clean fix for this one. I'm not going to tell you to unload on a client who asked about your weekend. Just know you're doing it. Count them for a day. It's more than you think.

The next weekend, or maybe the one after, we went to Great Wolf Lodge with friends.

Here's the part people struggle with.

We had fun.

Slides and chlorine and kids everywhere and a group of adults drinking coffee in the morning, something stronger by the afternoon, and yelling useful information at nobody in particular. I laughed. I meant it.

And the whole time there was a weight in the back of my head that never left.

Both were true at once.

We have this idea that somebody carrying something heavy walks around visibly carrying it. That there's a tell. You would not have seen it on me. You'd have seen a dad at a water park.

So when you look at somebody in your life and think, well, they seem fine. That's not evidence. That's what the outside of a person looks like.

A few weeks later, the arraignment. I pleaded not guilty, which at arraignment is a placeholder, not a claim of innocence. Four minutes of procedure and a date on a calendar.

Then COVID. The courts closed.

You'd think I was relieved. More time, more runway.

No. What I couldn't stand was never the sentencing. COVID didn't take away the sentencing. It took away the end of the not knowing.

And it took something else I didn't notice at the time. When the courts closed, the pressure to tell my wife closed with them. If sentencing happens on schedule, there's a Monday where a judge says a number out loud and I have to go home and explain where I've been. The date does the work. The date makes you honest whether you're ready or not.

Take the date away and nothing forces anything. So the truth became optional, every day, by me.

Nobody picks the hard optional thing on a random Tuesday.

I thought the arrest was the worst part. It's the part with the visual.

The arrest was three hours. The not knowing was two years.

Most of you aren't getting arrested on a Sunday afternoon. But most of you are carrying something you haven't told anybody. A number in your business you haven't said out loud. A conversation you've been not having for eleven months. A health thing you haven't gone and gotten looked at, because as long as you don't go, you don't have to know.

The not knowing isn't protecting you. It has the exact texture of protection.

But you're paying anyway. In sleep. At the water park with your kids. In the gap between how loud it is inside and how fine it looks outside. Just in a currency nobody can see, which means nobody can help you with it.

Wednesday, what happened while everything was paused.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt.