Maybe it was every Sunday. Maybe it was twice a month. Memory has a way of compressing the things that mattered into a feeling of always. What I know is that we drove to the same restaurant and ate the same pizza and I performed the same routine: working my way around the table, asking parents and grandparents for quarters until my pockets jingled with possibility.

The arcade swallowed me whole. I cannot remember the names of the games, only the feeling of the joystick in my palm and the blinking lights and the sense that time had become irrelevant. Then someone would wave me back. The pizza had arrived. Hot wings. The clatter of plates. Conversations I was too young to follow but old enough to absorb.

My sisters, both more than fifteen years older, worked at one of the Grottos locations in those years. They existed in a different chapter of the family story, already adults while I was still collecting quarters. And always, in the warmer months, there was the hope that we might drive to Rehoboth afterward. I waited each spring for Fun Land to open the way other kids waited for Christmas. The possibility of sneaking over for a few rides after dinner turned an ordinary Sunday into something electric with anticipation.

I did not understand then what was being built. I thought it was just pizza and arcade games and the occasional tilt-a-whirl. I did not see the architecture. But that is how the most important things get constructed. Not through grand gestures or milestone events, but through ordinary acts repeated so often they become invisible. The ritual becomes the relationship. The relationship becomes the foundation. And by the time you notice, you are standing on something solid that you never saw anyone pour.

[PULLOUT:0]

The church we attended felt like an extension of the neighborhood itself. Everyone seemed to go, or at least everyone I knew. Sunday mornings folded into Sunday evenings when I returned for youth group, a loose gathering of teenagers united by games in the parking lot and conversations that wandered into territory we would never have explored alone. We talked about faith, yes. But mostly we talked about becoming. About fear and friendship and the strange work of figuring out who you might be. And girls. We talked about girls constantly, with the confused intensity that only teenage boys can muster, as if we might somehow solve the mystery through sheer repetition of the question. Many of those friends are still my closest friends today. Our wives have become friends. Our children run through the same yards we once did, building something whose shape they cannot yet see. We were bound not by choice but by repetition. We showed up to the same place so often that we became stitched into each other’s lives, and the stitching held.

The Foundation of Presence

My family ate dinner together every night. My father cooked. He got home earlier than my mother, so the kitchen became his domain. I do not remember what we talked about. I remember that we talked. The table was where the day ended, where the family reconvened, where nothing particularly important happened and everything important was built. Roughly once a week we ate at my grandparents’ house instead, their table becoming an extension of ours, the generations layered together over pot roast or whatever was served. The meal itself mattered less than the fact of gathering. Another brick in a foundation I would not recognize until decades later.

I cook for my own family now. Rachel, blessed at many things, has graciously accepted the division of labor that puts me at the stove and her at the sink. We sit down with Ford and Avery most nights, and we talk. But I notice the drift. The television hums in the background more often than it should. Phones appear at the edges of the table like uninvited guests. The ritual remains, but something in it has softened. I catch myself glancing at a notification mid-sentence and feel a small betrayal I cannot quite name.

For a stretch of months, maybe longer, our closest friends came over every week for game night. Cards, drinks, laughter that stretched past the usual bedtime. Then the rhythm broke. Schedules shifted. The standing invitation quietly dissolved, replaced by nothing in particular, by the vague intention to “get together soon” that never quite becomes a date on the calendar. This is how architecture crumbles. Not dramatically, but through the slow accumulation of skipped weeks and broken rhythms until one day you realize the structure is gone and you cannot remember exactly when it fell.

Our children’s lives have expanded in ways my childhood never did. Gymnastics, piano, theater. The calendar fills with practices and rehearsals and recitals. I watch other families drive to tournaments two hours away most weekends, their minivans packed with equipment and snacks for travel sports that consume entire seasons. These things have their purpose. I see my kids growing, learning discipline, finding joy in mastery. But the math is unforgiving. A week only holds so many hours, and every hour claimed by an activity is an hour unavailable for the unstructured gathering, the standing dinner, the Sunday that belongs to no one but the people you love. We are building something in our children. I just wonder sometimes what we are failing to build around them.

Rachel and I have protected one tradition with something close to ferocity. Every Friday, for years, we have a date night. The world does not get to interrupt it. That single commitment has done more for our marriage than any grand gesture ever could. Showing up, week after week, especially when tired, especially when there is nothing urgent to say. The repetition is the point.

When the Rhythm Breaks

I run businesses that depend on technology. I am surrounded by innovation, by people building tools that make yesterday’s friction disappear. I love what is new. I love the elegant system, the clever solution, the interface that simplifies what was once complex. But I am beginning to understand that some things should not be optimized. Relationships require friction. They require the inconvenience of presence, the willingness to be bored together, to have the same conversation twice, to sit across from the same faces until the familiarity itself becomes a kind of home.

[PULLOUT:1]

The loneliness epidemic does not confuse me anymore. We traded ordinary rituals for infinite options. We kept our schedules open in case something better appeared. We built lives of maximum flexibility and discovered that flexibility is a poor foundation for anything. Trust requires repetition. Depth requires time. The quiet comfort of community requires the willingness to commit to a place and a people and a rhythm that does not bend to convenience. We stopped showing up, and then wondered why we felt so alone.

Building for Those Who Come After

I am mostly talking to myself here. I am realizing that the things I took for granted as a child were not accidents. They were constructed by people who understood something we have half-forgotten. That presence is a practice. That love is mostly a matter of showing up. That the things worth remembering rarely announce themselves while they are happening. They just ask you to be there, again and again, until the ordinary becomes sacred.

I want my children to have a place they return to so often it becomes part of who they are. A circle of friends bound by more than algorithm. A table where the same people gather, week after week, until the rhythm becomes the story they tell their own children someday.

The pizza at Grottos was never the point. The quarters, the arcade games, the hope of Fun Land afterward. None of it was the point.

The point was that we showed up. And that when I close my eyes, I can still feel the weight of those Sunday evenings pressing gently against my chest, asking me what I intend to build for the ones who come after me.