When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine years old, my brothers and I pooled our saved allowances and bought a really cool radio.  It stood about a foot high and was shaped like a rocket.  It rested on its tail fins, nose pointed skyward, and out of that nose we drew up the antenna to get a signal.  We had that radio for years.  For some of the time, we lived in very small towns or on farms, and that rocket radio was our connection with the greater world.  I remember lying awake at night listening to music broadcast from the AM super stations out of places like Omaha, Des Moines, Cincinnati, Denver, and Oklahoma City.

Over time, I also owned a bunch of portable transistor radios, and then there were, of course, the radios in the cars my parents owned.  As a result, I grew up on Rock and Roll and Rock-A-Billy and all the popular music piped ceaselessly across the AM airways in the 50s and 60s.  Better than a time machine, certain songs take me back immediately to a particular moment in the past: “Peggy Sue” and the summer of 1957 when I was in love with a girl named Nelda Griffin; Roy Orbison’s “Cryin” and me trying to hit those high notes just as my voice was beginning to change; Brylcreeming my hair so that I could look like the Everly Brothers, and singing “So Sad” to myself in the bathroom mirror.

When I began writing Ordinary Grace and trying to summon memories of the kind of summer I wanted to create for the story (in the end, the summer of 1961), I went back and listened to a bunch of the old songs that I grew up with.  Amazing how effective they were in helping me capture so much of the sense of being a kid back then—the innocence, the freedom, the unbounded possibility, the feel, for an adolescent in small town America, that there was this great world out there far beyond the corn fields, just waiting to be experienced.

The folks at Atria Books, my publisher, picked up on that sentiment and have put together a collection of some of my favorites from AM radio in the 50s and 60s.  They’ve created the playlist on Spotify.  If you have a free moment, check it out.

For those of us who grew up with AM radio, it’s a cool blast from the past.

If you’d to know how I was almost murdered on my way to Disneyland or how The Incredible Shrinking Man has affected my whole theological outlook,  follow these links to a couple of blogs I did as a guest for the terrific Criminal Element website:

How I Hitchhiked to Disneyland and Almost Died

Everything I Need to Know I Learned from The Incredible Shrinking Man

So, okay, here’s something way up there on the “Really Weird” scale.  It happened this way.

I went to Omaha to spend Memorial Day weekend with my wife’s family.  We left the Twin Cities Friday evening, drove to Des Moines, stayed the night, and arrived in Omaha on Saturday.  We visited cemeteries, placed flowers on family graves—a tradition I really dig—and that evening, my wife and I joined friends for drinks at a local brew pub.

Next thing I know, it’s 3:00 PM Sunday afternoon.  I wake up in the hospital with no recollection of the preceding 48 hours.  I’m kind of fuzzy, to say the least.  Diane, my wife, is the room, along with my brother-in-law.  As I come out of the haze, they’re laughing hysterically at everything I say.

“Where am I?” I ask.

They laugh, and my wife, good-naturedly says, “Lakeside Hospital.”

“How did I get here?”

They laugh.  “I brought you to the emergency room this morning,” she says.

“What’s wrong with me?”

This brings on a near hysterical bout of laughter.  “You have Transient Global Amnesia,” Diane finally manages to say.

I’m not sure if I should be upset, but her demeanor clearly indicates that I’m not in any real danger.  So I ask, “What’s so funny?”

“You’ve been asking the same questions for the last eight hours.”

So this is what, according to Diane, happened.  At 8:45 that Sunday morning, I suddenly began asking the same questions over and over again.  “Where are we?  How did we get here?  What day is it?”

Freaked, she drove me to the emergency room of a hospital two blocks from our hotel, where they did a CAT scan and an MRI, and determined that I hadn’t suffered a stroke or a seizure.  The neurologist came in on his day off because the situation intrigued him.  He finally diagnosed my condition as Transient Global Amnesia.  It’s a condition whose cause is unknown, but whose effect is temporary and with no lasting physiological or mental consequences.  I’ve just simply lost a couple of days out of my life, no memory at all of Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon.

Weird.  Really weird.  An incredible reminder of how fragile everything is in life.

I am nothing if not hopeful.  Hope rises in me, eternal.  Every December as the old year draws to a close and a new one stands on my threshold, I think, This is the year.

For what?  For becoming the person I would like to be.  And what is that?  A vision so mundane I’m a little ashamed to share it.  But here it is.

For starters, I want to be kinder and gentler.  I would like to be more forgiving.

I would like be less envious of the success of others.  When a friend or colleague hits a home run with a book, I would love to be able to celebrate that accomplishment without thinking that somehow their success is my failure.

I would like to be more generous.  My wife is a giving person, and I rely on her as a gauge for generosity.  At some point, when we discuss our charitable giving, I’d like the first number out of my mouth to match her best expectation.

I would like to remember the name of every individual who has told me in person that he or she enjoys my work.  This is especially true of those who’ve said this to me many times, but whom I continue to regard with utter cluelessness each time we meet.

I would like to write one thing that is true.  I don’t mean non-fiction.  I mean one thing that captures life truly, simply, and without artifice.

I would like to love more deeply, less selfishly, and with a broader stretch of my heart.

I would like to lose fifteen pounds.

I would like to become the writer I believe myself capable of being.

What is a resolution but a dream of what might be?  In my experience, dreams can come true, but only if you work on them.  Wish me luck.  And I’ll do the same for you.

Last month, on November 16, to be exact, I reached what many people consider one of the notable mileposts on the journey through life: I turned sixty.

What do I know at sixty?

My life is very different from what I’d imagined a man’s life to be at this age. When I was much younger, I figured sixty was pretty much the beginning of the rocking chair years, marking time until the grave. Instead of the end, however, what I see before me is a door opening onto a whole world of new possibility. In the last year, I’ve hit the NYT bestseller list (a first for me), finished writing two novels, and signed a contract for more. The last thing I want to do is sit in a rocker and stare into space.

But the question remains: What do I know at sixty?

Not as much as I’d hoped I might. I don’t feel wise at all. Life is still a knot I struggle every day to untangle. I’ve always been a worrier, and I still am. I worry about everything. I have more money now than I ever did, but I worry that it isn’t enough. My children are grown and out on their own, but I continue to worry about their well being; and I have grandchildren now to add to my worries. I work out regularly, but worry that I’ll never be able to get rid of that extra ten pounds that’s settled around my middle in the last couple of years. I worry that no matter what I write, it’s not good enough. I worry that I don’t do everything that I should to make life better for all of those in desperate need. I worry that whatever it is I’m supposed to have learned at sixty I’ve somehow missed.

What I don’t worry about is happiness. At sixty, I’m a pretty happy man—despite all my worries. And a lucky man. I’ve realized a life-long dream, which was to make my living doing what I love most: writing stories. And I know that although the Grim Reaper and I are speeding toward each other on the same set of tracks, before we collide, I believe, quite happily, that I have a great many more stories to write, love to give, and lessons to learn.

So, what do I know at sixty? Simply this: Life is a journey and there is no destination. No matter how fast I run, I will never arrive.