The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

by Robert Dugoni

There comes a day in every man’s life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back. —Maxwell Hill

Now, as an adult with that healthy dose of perspective we call experience, I realize my mother was right, as she was so often when it came to my life.

“People make fun of things they don’t understand.”

But to my mother—I suspect to all mothers—their little boys will always be their little boys, no matter how old those boys become.

this moment as the moment I became a man. It had not been my first beer or hangover, or the first time I’d gotten laid, as I had thought. It had not even been earlier that day, when I’d tossed my blue graduation cap into the air. It was the moment my mother needed me, and I was there for her.

For better or for worse—and too often it is for worse for so many of us—adulthood had arrived, whether I wanted it to or not.

There are moments, I believe, when we are capable of communicating with those we love without using our voices, moments when we think of someone and the phone rings, or we speak the person’s name and suddenly they are standing beside us.

we live for the quiet, intimate moments that mark not our calendars but our hearts: The day we marry. The days our children are born. Their first step. Their first word. Their first day of school. And when our children grow, we remember those moments with a touch of melancholy: the day they get their driver’s license, the day we drive them to college, the day they marry, and the day they have their children.

We realize it is in those quiet moments that each of us has the ability to make our lives extraordinary.