This was written by Coby Smolens - while I was in Austin
While Margit’s in Austin - The Boys Are Holding Down the Fort.
Forest Knolls may be where James and Margit keep their boots, but during Margit’s recent trip to Austin — helping daughter Nora, her partner Andrew, and our granddaughter Mabel — James set up camp three minutes away at my place in Lagunitas.
Now, I’ll admit, James and I didn’t start as best friends. We were “friends by necessity,” orbiting around Margit’s sun. But these visits have shifted the math. Somewhere between shared dinners, errand runs, and kitchen-table conversations about politics, medicine, or bluegrass music, we stopped being acquaintances with a common connection and became family. The kind of family that knows we’re in this for the long haul.
Our rhythm’s easy now. Weekday mornings: a mumbled good morning and our separate putterings until evening. Dinners together, then either James in the rocking chair with his phone while I’m on the couch with my guitar, or the two of us watching something on TV. (Archer didn’t land with him — or with Margit, for that matter — but I maintain it’s hilarious and stupidly thoughtful.) Bedtime’s 10:30-ish.
Two things still surprise me. First: his humility. If I sound certain, James will yield the point without fuss — and I’ve learned that’s my cue to fact-check, because he’s often right. Second: how capable he is here compared to some of Margit’s understandably worried reports. Case in point: the med box. Twenty-one little compartments, eight or nine different prescriptions, and he taught me how to fill it — with only a couple of tiny stumbles.
And then there’s the humor. James is fun to tease, and he dishes back in the form of relentless “dad jokes,” 90% groaners, 10% surprisingly good. I grade them out loud unless I’m laughing too hard.
Like the night he deadpanned, “I just found out I’m colorblind… The news came completely out of the green.” I gave it a 3.5, but he was very proud.
Or the time I looked up from my guitar to see him trying to figure out why his phone screen was black, only to realize he’d been patiently watching his lock screen for almost a full minute. He grinned, muttered “Lewey strikes again,” and we both cracked up.
When I tried to recall a few “James Journal” moments for this update, I phoned James and Margit on speaker to jog our memories. Let’s just say it reminded me how much smoother “real-time conversation” is for biological creatures who’ve had millennia to perfect it. Humans use tiny signals — a pause here, a breath there, an “uh-huh” — to pass the conversational baton. In digital space, those signals get stripped down and sent across with just enough delay to make everyone step on each other’s toes. And if you happen to have been born in 1959 Germany, like Margit, in a culture where something along the lines of “Ordentlich, zackig, mit Schwung – natürlich bin ich dabei!” (“Neat, snappy, with verve – of course I’m in!”) might as well have been printed on your birth certificate, then waiting out those pauses isn’t exactly in your DNA.
Margit worries — about hallucinations, missed meds, skipped meals, e-bike mishaps. She’d be reassured to see him here: remembering his meds, eating well, showering without prompting, laughing often.
Why am I telling you all this? Because none of it happens in a vacuum. The past couple of years have been brutal for James and Margit — physically, emotionally, financially — and still, they both give back. James volunteers at the Monday food bank. Margit’s time and skills are always in circulation. That e-trike James rides up Mt. Tam? Paid for by this campaign.
Your help doesn’t just keep the lights on — it keeps moments like this alive: the three of us at a table near the Bovine Bakery in Point Reyes on a Saturday morning, sticky-buns and coffee in hand, laughing about something absurd before riding back to the valley. The kind of moment you think will go on forever — until you remember the unforgiving, terminal biology quietly moving the clock forward.
If you’ve already given, thank you. If you can help again, you’re not just funding needs — you’re preserving these days while we still have them.
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