appetizer

My Dad and I listened to East of Eden on audiobook earlier this month while driving up to Maine (read the Main Course for full context!). It’s been ten years since I first read the book while I was in India, and Steinbeck’s multigenerational epic is as compelling as ever. There’s dozens of quotes worth sharing, but these three on the subject of choice feel like an apt intro to the main course:

“Life is a series of choices, each one a step toward a destination we cannot fully comprehend. It is the journey that shapes us, not just the end point we seek.”

”I often wonder how much of what we feel depends on our own choice. If I choose to be happy, will I be happy? If I choose to be sad, does that mean I am sad? The question lingers, for I know that we are shaped by our choices, and yet the world still acts upon us in ways we cannot predict.”

“In the end, we are defined not by our circumstances but by our reactions to them. It is our choices, our responses to the challenges life throws at us, that shape who we become.”

main course. ‍

‍The Guest Book

A book sits on the bedside table in the guest room of my parents’ home. It is bound in a split sheet of cardboard, such that the exterior of the book is covered in repeating hills and valleys. Run the back of your fingernail across it, and it’ll chatter like a washboard.

Inscribed on the book’s first page is an address on Klein Wassenar in Lakeside, a suburb of Cape Town. Written in silver sharpie, the playful curves of each letter and number glisten in the light. To know someone by their handwriting is a treasured intimacy. This handwriting belongs to my mother.

On the facing page, in a different hand, black ink reads “Heloise and Henry, 6/8/95,” followed by “Malmsbury, UK,” and then, “To Kim and Nick. We really miss you guys. Great to see you both again.”

The next entry is dated August of ’95, follows a similar form to the first, going a bit longer, and bears my aunt Lisa’s signature.

As pages turn, handwriting and signatures change, dates creep from the past toward the present.

There is a gap of time between the entries from ’95 to ’99. Then, the silver sharpie lists a new address in Morris Plains, New Jersey. The entries continue into the turn of the century, and from here on, they are addressed “To Kim, Nick, Josh, and Ben,” in various permutations.

Some handwriting recurs; in one case, an early signature as 'Mom + Dad' later appears as “Oupi + Granny.”

An address for Southampton Lodge in Hampshire denotes a new chapter, and the entries evolve with it. They fill the pages now, telling stories of laughter, meals, inside jokes.

“Love you guys for eternity. New Years was really special,” reads the entry signed by my uncle Andrew. A photograph titled “New Years ’03” is affixed to the next page; my mom is dancing amidst family and friends in the Southampton Lodge living room. On the page after that, the paint-covered footprint of my Godmother’s then-5-month-old daughter Mia is wrapped in stories of their visit to England.

After an entry in 2006, the silver marker makes another appearance. An address in Randolph, New Jersey. Years pass in the penmanship of others.

In 2016, another address, this one in Nashville, Tennessee. This chapter fills the rest of the pages in the book with a variety of openings. Some entires begin, “To Kim + Nick”, “KNJB”, or “Kim, Nick, Josh, Ben, Pocket, and Porter,” but most often, they read “To the Lanes.”

The cast of contributors grows by the page, though the frequent authors of the first pages are less frequent now. In 2017, Granny’s entries are no longer accompanied by Oupi’s. There’s a series of six pages all referencing Ben’s 21st Birthday Party whose author’s home addresses range from New Mexico to New York to London. Signatures include Madrone, Dewey, Boone, Doug, and Feathers, many of whom write about a garden unrivaled in all the world and incredible music performed in humble venues.

The date on the book’s last page is August, 2023. But on the inside of the back cover, glued to the back page, is a second, slightly smaller journal. There the entries continue.

The most recent entry—dated for January of 2025—is signed, “With so much love, Anand K. Macherla.”

Anand’s Entry

Anand and I met at the University of New Mexico through Dr. Manuel Montoya, a professor whose lessons land like gifts in the lives of his students.

Anand and I, as well as many of our peers, involved ourselves in the student group Manuel advised called International Business Students Global (IBSG). To this engaged group, I think of the gifts he gave us as a triptych. He cultivated in his students a sharp, kind curiosity about the world. He reinforced courage to form ideas from collaborative exploration—to voice one’s questions. He led us to look at the world’s answers as if we were photographers, seeking not only to document a thing from every angle and focal length, but to understand a thing in all lights—to know its beauty as well as its ugliness.

Through Dr. Montoya, Anand and I shared the assumed closeness enjoyed among many of IBSG’s most involved members. I’m not sure how much time the two of us spent in direct proximity or collaboration. I don’t think we shared a classroom, and moments spent just the two of us were few. But we were Dr. Montoya’s students. We’d each stepped deeper into his non-linear ways of looking at business, art, and life. That was enough to know—conversation and friendship would always come easily.

It had been seven years since Anand and I had last seen each other. Our text message history went silent between 2018 and 2022. The radio silence was interrupted by birthday wishes from Anand and my asking where he was living and what he was doing. Baltimore. Doing well. Working. Traveling.

His last text to me read: “Given how much we both like to travel, I’m surprised we haven’t overlapped more!” In mid January of 2025, another 2 year interlude is broken.

“Hey! Is this still Josh’s number? This is Anand!”

“Anand! Yes it is. How are you?”

“I’m doing well! Super out of the blue question. Please, please feel free to say no if at all inconvenient. My gf, my roommate, and I are driving from ABQ to Baltimore in her RV van this week, and stopping for a night in Nashville on Saturday (none of us have spent any meaningful time there! Any chance one of us (or two?) could crash on a couch or something? Again, seriously no worries if it’s not doable! But wanted to reach out to see if this could be an excuse to hang and catch up!”

Anand, his girlfriend Sne, and his friend and roommate Iliana spent Saturday night and much of Sunday with my parents and I. When they arrived, we shared a meal and swapped stories from the years since we’d last seen each other. Be it the presence of our loved ones or my own imperfect memory, Anand and I found ourselves reconnecting as if no time had passed—perhaps even more fully than we had in university.

The next morning, our guests and I joined my Mom for Ecstatic Dance, a recurring freeform dance practice with a budding community in Nashville. It’s very Burning Man in nature and programming, as much as a recurring event can be in the “real world”. The brief is simple enough: attendees are encouraged to move their bodies to a live DJ set however they feel their bodies want to move. There’s usually a connection exercise at the start, 75 minutes of dancing with no verbal communication, then a slowing down to stillness before eventually closing the session in a gratitude circle. It was a leap of faith for Anand & co. to throw themselves into what my Mom has taken to calling ‘Dance Church’.

By the end of the session, sure enough, they couldn’t wipe the smiles off their faces any less than the rest of us. Anand even got to surprise our mutual friend Doug (another UNM alum and Anand’s former fraternity brother) on the dance floor.

Back at the house, Mom concluded her hosting duties by presenting the guest book to her latest guests along with a pen.

“You have to sign this before you go,” she said. She italicized “have” with her tone as I had heard her do with so many guests before. It echoed Granny’s tone of insistence. The voice of the matriarch upholding a family tradition.

Thoughtful as ever, Anand was happy to oblige.

The Maine Quest

Anand & co.’s timing couldn’t have been much better. An hour before Iliana pulled her van up to my parents’ home, my plane landed at Nashville International Airport. I’d spent the previous three days in Portland, Maine for a final round of interviews with the staff and leadership of Portland Hearts of Pine. Hearts is a new mens professional soccer team kicking off their inaugural season in March of this year.

I’d first spoken with the team’s founder Gabe a year ago. I was struck by the clarity of Gabe’s vision and his ambitions for what the team could and should mean to its community.

Sometime around Christmas, I saw the team had posted a role similar in description to that of the one I’d held at New Mexico United. I reached out to Gabe, and we arranged to continue our conversation. With each conversation came more certainty, and eventually an in-person visit complete with—in Gabe’s words—the Portland propaganda tour. Despite the cold winter that comes to Maine in January, I could see my future waiting for me. There is a life waiting to be made for myself there.

Back in Nashville, around the dinner table and fresh off my flight home, Anand asked about work. I shared my hope of receiving an offer to help build Maine’s professional soccer team.

One week later, Mom, Dad, Doug and I toasted to the realization of those hopes, New Mexico’s Gruet sparkling wine in our glasses and Maine on our minds.

With bubbles in our bellies and the bottle empty, the conversation—as it is want to do in my father’s presence—turned practical. Calendar. Logistics. Accommodation. To-do list. The collective learnings of four cross-atlantic and several domestic moves all surfaced in our minds. That experience helps to make the logistics straightforward. It allows more space for sentimentality. When moving the boxes is easy, you get to focus on what you pack into them.

This next chapter would be my first time renting a space on my own. That question of how to make a house a home. What do you take? What artifacts of life do you bring with you from this chapter into the next? When I left New Mexico, I was sorting through the artifacts of those eight years in the Southwest. This time, I’m pulling from the full catalogue.

I searched our family home for objects that might bring with them an essence of home. I saw Ben do it when he went back to New Mexico and again when he went to Chicago. Earmarking objects to take with him, hoping that they might carry more than their physical weight. There must be an aura imbued in things that serve as the setting, the objects, the witnesses of our daily lives. I did much of the same, hopeful that the artworks of my mother, my grandmother, and my great grandmother would bring with them the warmth I have known to radiate from their painters.

One week on from accepting the offer, Dad and I arrived in Portland with a Uhaul and my Mazda CX-5 on a trailer. I had an apartment sorted, the snow wasn’t too deep, and moving in was a smooth affair. 24 hours later, I found myself in Portland’s beloved antique store turned bar turned night club called Bubbas Sulky Lounge helping to photograph the “Bandit Kit”. This all capping off a first day which saw me meet many of the staff, players, and even the Governor (who was wearing a Hearts jersey) at the state capital.

Life will only accelerate in the coming year. I’m revising this on a flight back from Bermuda where I spent the past four days documenting the team’s preseason.

When life is this dense, sentiments settle on the story of one’s life like layers of sediment. Ideas and intentions are buried in the strata of memories before I have an opportunity to reflect; before the the depths of gratitude are realized, before I can say as deeply as I should the things I must. Thank you. I love you. I miss you.

But of course, movement has a way of unsettling even the most settled things. A journey forward always kicks up traces of the past.

Memories Young, Memories Old

I told my friend Damian the news of my new job and the move up to Portland over whatsapp.

He’d sent three voice notes in response. The first of which was his expert advice for me to pass on to the coach regarding the merits of what he called “Cocaine-Football.” The second included questions about the move. The third he ended with, “I’m not sure I ever got the story, why exactly did you leave New Mexico?”

It is a strange thing we do, leaving a place we know and claim to love. A place where our loved ones live, where we know and are known to its rhythms and regulars. Trading these for true unknowns of a new place, a new set of people who all start as strangers. From this perspective, perhaps it is more than strange. Yet here I am, going with enthusiasm into the wilderness again.

“I left New Mexico because it was time.” How many more ways are there to say what is, at this point, a simple truth so long in the past now that one has let it lie where it landed. The sediment around that decision is deep now, the weight of new experience forcing it to conglomerate, closer to the bedrock of my story.

Whatever boldness I’ve shown with my own decisions, I’ll always rate my parents’ move from Cape Town to New Jersey. It is hard to imagine a better life than what they described to me of that chapter in Cape Town. The city where they’d studied together, where they’d started a life and a family, where grandparents lived just the right distance away to be helpful but not overbearing, and where they had cultivated an incredibly rich circle of friends over more than a decade. They left that behind. When I ask them Damian’s question, I often hear a list of reasons for why they left—calls to adventure, a new chapter of our family’s own making. Always though, I hear my father say, “It was time.”

If they second guessed their decisions, they never let it show. I’m sure they did, and I’m sure the visits of friends and family brought much of the reassurance they needed to go on. Life is too exciting for me to be second guessing it. All the same, I’ll take comfort in our family guest book’s pages and the legacy I’ve inherited.

Inheritance

I flip the to the last page and find Anand’s entry.

“To the Lanes,” he begins. “It seems appropriate that your last name should mean ‘the small, local roads and paths that weave neighborhoods, connect communities, and bring people together.’”

How is it that the most obvious truths can hide in such plain sight? The visitors in this guest book have traveled paths across oceans. Their messages of love and gratitude make international journeys feel local. Such is my inheritance. A surname defined as a noun, with the implication of a verb.

Reading Anand’s note, I contemplate my own contribution, and my obligation to the home and life I hope to create in Maine. I pull up my to-do list, now with many of the move-related steps checked off. New bullet point: Portland Guest Book.

I wonder what stories my guest book will have to tell in 30 years. Hopefully some written in your handwriting. Perhaps I too can make a home worthy of the name Lane.

dessert.

At the end of that main course, I referenced a noun behaving as a verb. My attention to this behavior and the meanings implied by how we use words has been attuned recently thanks to Braiding Sweetgrass. In her reflections, Robin Wall Kimmerer muses on how Indigenous languages, particularly Potawatomi, treat nouns as dynamic entities, much like verbs. In English, only about 30% of words are verbs, while in Potawatomi, roughly 70% are verbs. This linguistic structure highlights a worldview that sees everything as interconnected and alive.

Kimmerer illustrates this beautifully with the example of a bay. In Potawatomi, a bay is considered animate. It is a verb and must be conjugated as such. That makes a whole lot of sense if you slow down to appreciate its implications. A bay is in motion as a part of the water cycle, it has the potential to transform into a river, waterfall, ocean, or to evaporate and become cloud. The language itself remindd us that our surroundings are not static but constantly evolving. When referring to an apple, Potawatomi asks, "Who is that being?" instead of "What is it?"

By viewing language in this way, Kimmerer encourages us to appreciate the stories and connections that bind us to each other and to nature. Our identities are part of a larger narrative, and the way we articulate our surroundings can shape our understanding of our place in the world. This insight serves as a reminder that our names and the language we use carry deeper meanings and responsibilities. All this to say, I’d encourage you to give Braiding Sweetgrass a read if, like me, you’re equally late to that party.

To-Go Box.

I've made some progress on the watchlist I shared as part of my end-of-2024 movie list. Nickel Boys and The Brutalist are the two I’ll be recommending for a long time to come. I won’t spoil anything beyond sharing the trailers and saying this: if art is a medium for cultivating empathy, these two films are shining examples of what art can achieve.

And while I’m referencing long irrelevant end-of-year lists, it feels as appropriate a moment as any for me to share my “songs that made 2024” playlist. All 14 hours and 36 minutes of it. Most of which didn’t even come out in 2024. Enjoy :)

That’s it for this edition of the Family Dinner Newsletter.  Thank you for sharing this meal with me, for taking a seat at the table again.

The best part of any shared meal is the conversation, so I would love to hear any thoughts, feedback, or recommendations you have. You can share those by replying to the newsletter email. If you haven't subscribed yet, do so below, and feel free to respond to the welcome email with any thoughts!

Until next time, much love.