Tag Archives: history

Before She Forgets

Reposting a piece I wrote about my mom, brother and our road trip this summer (2026)

There are moments when the future arrives without fanfare.

Not in the form of some spectacular technological breakthrough or a dramatic life event, but as a sentence spoken quietly in a doctor’s office.

“Go now.”

Not next year. Not when it’s more convenient. Not after everyone’s schedules clear.

Go now, because next year she may not be able to make this trip.

As an applied futurist, I spend my life helping organizations think about tomorrow. I study change, emerging behaviors, and the signals that shape what comes next. But every once in a while, life reminds me that the future isn’t something waiting out there.

Sometimes the most important future you’ll ever build is the one you choose to live today.

My mother, ‘Mama Rose,’ as everyone calls her, had only one request for her 80th birthday. She wanted to go back to Drummond Island, Michigan. Back to where she and my dad honeymooned in 1964. Where my siblings and I spent summers camping, catching sucker fish by hand, exploring the woods, and believing those endless Michigan days would last forever.

My father has been gone for ten years. Dementia took him from us in the summer of 2016.

Now, dementia is beginning to steal pieces of my mother.

Not all at once.

Just enough to remind us that memory isn’t permanent.

Some days on our trip she didn’t know where she was. She’d ask if we’d eaten, even though lunch had been an hour before. More than once she reached into her purse, expecting to find the wallet she’d carried for decades. Instead she found only the things that still matter to her: the latest Amish Hearts novel she was reading that we refer to as her Amish porn; a small notebook, and a couple of pens.

Her wallet lives with my brother now.

So do her medications. He quietly hands them to her twice a day. He watches her water intake. He hides the ibuprofen until it’s time. He gently reminds her where they are, what day it is, and that she’s having a wonderful adventure.

My older brother Tim is a disabled veteran. He’s also my mother’s full-time caregiver. Watching the tenderness between them became one of the unexpected gifts of this journey.

Road trips distort time

Days become measured not in hours, but in state lines, gas stations, ferry crossings, ice cream cones, remember-when stories and whatever ridiculous thing makes everyone laugh at the next stop.

We didn’t rush.

That was the point.

Mom and Tim left Apache Junction, Arizona, where my parents settled after leaving Michigan more than twenty years ago, and where my brother eventually joined all of us to build a life out West. The next afternoon they pulled up the long dirt mountain road in northern New Mexico, where I live tucked amongst art-making, nature, and animals. We loaded the last bags into the car, and the three of us pointed the car north.

Almost immediately, the trip settled into its own rhythm.

Music from our youth

Road trip snacks

Always a fresh, crisp Diet Coke for Mama Rose

Bathroom breaks

Colorado welcomed us with mountains and hot springs near Great Sand Dunes National Park. We soaked our bones before spending the night in Glen Eyrie Castle outside Colorado Springs because, honestly, if you’re turning eighty, you deserve to sleep in a castle at least once.

The next morning we traded mountains for prairie.

Kansas unfolded exactly as Kansas should: endless sky, grain elevators, weathered barns, and highways that somehow invited conversation. Stories surfaced that none of us had thought about in years. The kind of stories that only appear when no one is in a hurry.

Nebraska rolled into Iowa almost without announcement. Cornfields replaced mountains. Windmills replaced rock formations. We wandered into little towns, stopped at roadside attractions, browsed thrift shops, and never passed a free little library or a yard sale without a u-turn. Afternoons became unexpected treasure hunts that produced absolutely nothing we needed and everything we enjoyed.

Eventually we reached Wisconsin. Instead of driving around the lake, we drove onto the SS Badger in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Watching our car disappear into the belly of the ship felt victorious because we had reached a planned destination on the trip. We climbed onto the deck and spent four hours crossing one of the Great Lakes.

There is something magical about arriving in your home state by water.

Michigan doesn’t slowly appear. It rises.

At first it’s just a dark line on the horizon. Then trees. Then dunes. Then rock formations. Then the shoreline we’ve known our whole lives, the one our family’s roller-skating rink used to perch on. It felt like returning to a conversation we’d stepped away from years ago.

We celebrated Mom’s eightieth birthday in Muskegon, Michigan, with family and friends that feel like family. She felt loved.

We went wandering north along M-22, one of the most beautiful drives anywhere in the country. Every curve – another postcard: vineyards, cherry orchards, little harbor towns, and stretches of blue water that looked more like an ocean than a lake. We spent time with old friends on benches looking out at the long stretches of blue.

Arriving in Traverse City, it was buzzing with the National Cherry Festival, but our first stop wasn’t one of the attractions. It was Dockside Market. Every summer since the 1980s, Dad bought cherry-smoked turkey jerky there. Not because it was famous, but because it had become one of those family traditions no one questioned. Some traditions don’t need improving. They simply need repeating. So we bought the jerky. Dad wasn’t there to eat it. But somehow, he was.

We crossed the Mackinac Bridge with the same sense of anticipation we always had as kids, knowing the Upper Peninsula meant freedom, woods, beaches, and another world entirely.

As we drove around the U.P., we found ourselves watching not one but three of those classic small-town Independence Day parades where volunteers tossed candy from floats.

Not just any candy.

Tootsie Rolls.

Mom’s favorite.

By the end of all the parades, we had collected an entire bucket of them for her and all the other candy was handed over to a little toddler at the last parade of the day. He was thrilled.

She smiled like a little girl.

That night in Sault Ste. Marie, we watched Fourth of July fireworks explode over the St. Mary’s River while Canada shimmered just across the water.

Then came the day we’d all been waiting for. Drummond Island.

Mom wasn’t looking for a new experience. She wanted to see what remained.

Arriving at Detour, Michigan, crossing Lake Huron on the ferry. The roads on the island that led to connection points she could easily recall.

The shorelines.

The campsites.

She wanted to see them one more time while she still could. The places where she had fallen in love. The places where she had raised a family. The places where she built a lifetime of memories before they are slowly carried away.

After leaving the Upper Peninsula, we hugged Michigan’s eastern shoreline, following historic US-23 and M-25 through beach towns and quiet harbors. We stopped for ice cream because it was summer; always Boston Coolers for me because when in Michigan you drink Vernors in all forms! We drove through farm country for hours, laughing because we were only slightly nervous about where the next gas station was. We talked about childhood adventures, our dad, our futures, and Mom’s declaration that she plans to live to be 107.

I sincerely hope she’s right.

Eventually we reached Detroit, where Tim checked off his own list of places he’d always wanted to see, from sports venues to sculptures, and the new Gordy Howe International Bridge changing the skyline of a city from our childhood.

Then another chapter quietly opened.

My youngest daughter, a fresh high school graduate marking the beginning of my own empty-nester season, flew into Detroit to meet me. Mom and Tim would continue their journey back to Arizona. My daughter and I would begin another adventure together.

In a street outside the hotel, I hugged my brother; he cried, and I cried. Then I hugged my mom, tight. I thanked them both for giving me one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received.

People often ask me what being a futurist has taught me. For years I’d answer with human-centric foresight for imagining what comes next.

This trip reminded me what’s really real. The pause.

The future isn’t built by constantly looking ahead. It’s built by fully inhabiting the present while you still can. We spend so much time planning for tomorrow that we forget tomorrow is made from today’s ordinary moments.

A ferry ride across Lake Michigan.

Hot springs and a castle in Colorado.

Cherry-smoked turkey jerky bought from the same market your dad visited 62 years ago.

A bucket full of Tootsie Rolls collected at a small-town parade.

A purse that no longer carries a wallet but still carries what matters.

A son quietly handing his mother her medicine.

An eighty-year-old woman returning to the island where her story began before memory slowly carries pieces of it away.

The doctor’s advice was simple.

Go now.

I’m grateful we listened.

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The Human Experience of Artemis II

There’s something electric about this moment.

I’ve always been a space nerd. I love everything about it. These ten days feel like an invitation to lean all the way in, to follow closely, to let myself get pulled into the details. As Artemis II rounds the moon, it somehow feels like we’re all up there with them. Not just watching, but experiencing it in real time.

Image by Cyndi Coon

One of the first details that stopped me was learning that the astronauts were trained in photography. You can feel it in the images coming back. They’re paying attention to light, to shadow, to the curve of Earth rising in a frame. These aren’t quick snapshots. They carry intention. You can sense a human behind the lens, aware that what they’re seeing is rare and worth shaping.

Back on Earth, Mission Control adds another layer. The livestream voices move with a kind of poetic flow alongside what we’re seeing, and it shifts how the moment lands. When something is that expansive, language stretches. People reach for rhythm, for metaphor, for something that can hold awe without flattening it. It doesn’t feel forced. It feels like a natural response to what’s unfolding.

Music has quietly become part of the experience too. Every morning, the astronauts are woken up with a song. There’s something intimate about that, this daily ritual carried into space. And back here on Earth, people have started tracking those songs, sharing the NASA-provided playlist built by the astronauts before launch. It creates a thread between worlds. You can press play and, for a moment, sync your day with theirs. Same music, different gravity.

There’s also something deeply personal woven into the mission. A crater on the moon named after an astronaut’s wife who passed away. What a beautiful thing to bring memory into orbit. It reminds you that even at this scale, everything is still anchored in human lives, human relationships, human loss and love. Moments like that have a way of reframing everything else around them. It settles in, and suddenly the whole mission feels different.

Sitting with all of this, it’s hard not to notice what it says about where we’re headed. For a long time, there’s been this quiet assumption that the future belongs to code, to systems, to efficiency. That as technology advances, the expressive, human parts of us somehow matter less. But here we are, sending humans around the moon, and what we choose to carry alongside the science are cameras, playlists, stories, names that hold memory, and people on the ground who know how to hold attention.

The arts have always been how we make sense of things that are too big to hold all at once. That could be grief after losing someone, or the feeling of looking back at Earth from space. In both cases, the scale is overwhelming in its own way. We write, we create, we compose, we frame. These are the ways we take something vast and turn it into something we can live with. Science makes it possible to reach those moments. The humanities give us a way to understand them, to sit with them, to shape them into meaning, and to share that meaning with others.

What’s unfolding with Artemis II makes it clear that those human layers aren’t fading as our tools get more advanced. If anything, they’re becoming more intentional. The photography isn’t incidental. The music isn’t filler. The storytelling isn’t an add-on. Each of these elements is part of how the mission is being experienced and remembered. A photograph taken in orbit becomes a cultural artifact. A song played at wake-up becomes a shared ritual across millions of people. A poetic line becomes part of how we hold this moment over time.

There’s a quiet recognition in that. Getting somewhere isn’t enough. We want to feel it. We want to share it. We want to remember it. We want to make meaning from it together. The more complex the technology becomes, the more care we seem to be putting into shaping the experience for humans. This is the work of the humanities, not as decoration, but as something foundational.

And there’s something else in this that matters. We are not just building missions anymore. We are building experiences that people can enter from wherever they are. The livestreams, shaped by voices that understand performance, create a sense of presence. The images, composed with care, invite us to linger a little longer. The music lets us align our daily rhythms with people moving through space. It becomes participatory in a way that feels deeply human.

That shift matters more than we might realize. When the future is something that only happens at a distance, it’s easy to ignore. But when it becomes something you can feel, something you can step into even briefly, it becomes part of your lived experience. And that changes your relationship to it.

Right now, as Artemis II moves through space, there’s a kind of rehearsal happening. Not just for future missions, but for how we show up to the moments that define us. We are practicing attention. We are practicing shared awe. We are practicing how to carry our stories, our art, our music, and our memories with us as we go further than we’ve ever gone before.

And in that, there’s a quiet clarity. Our future is being shaped not only by what we build, but by how deeply we stay connected to what makes us human.

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Exploring the Possibilities – Building Future Artifacts

I recently spent the day at Northern New Mexico College, surrounded by middle school girls, cardboard, tape, and a whole lot of imagination.

I was invited by the New Mexico Network for Women in Science and Engineering to lead workshops as part of their “Exploring the Possibilities” STEM event. They organize these experiences across the state, and you can feel the impact immediately. The room was full of curiosity before we even started.

We began with a time jump. It’s 2046. You’re 20 years older. The world didn’t stand still. Some things got better, some got messier.


I asked them to write quickly, no overthinking, about one thing they would fix, solve, or change before then. That shift, from now to later, changed the energy in the room. Suddenly, they weren’t just students. They were decision-makers.

From there, we moved into sketches and then into building. Cardboard bases, tape and glue everywhere, beads, and scraps. It got messy fast, in the best possible way. They built what we called future artifact portals, physical objects from 2046 that solve a problem they care about.

Not ideas floating around, but something you could hold, point to, and explain.

As they worked, the thinking started to surface. Who uses this? When? What does it change? What might it break? Without calling it anything formal, they were working through systems, cause and effect, and the reality that every object carries choices inside it.

What I love about this kind of work is how quickly it becomes real for them. The future stops feeling distant. It becomes something you can shape. You can see it happen in their hands, in the way they test, adjust, and explain their builds to each other.

It was collaborative and full of energy. The kind of learning that doesn’t sit still. I got to walk them through what being a futurist looks like in practice: not guessing, but making. Prototypes, sketches, artifacts. Evidence of ideas. It was so fun. There’s something powerful about stepping away from screens and building in the physical world. You can watch thinking happen in real time. You can see confidence grow as something takes shape.

I’m grateful to the New Mexico Network for Women in Science and Engineering for the invitation and for the work they’re doing across New Mexico. Experiences like this matter.

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