I’ve written before about the house I grew up in. It wasn’t an easy place to be. As a boy, I wasn’t looking for luxury. I was looking for somewhere else.
I found it in the school library.
Every week there was a copy of The New Yorker waiting on the shelf and the Sunday New York Times. During free periods, I’d find a quiet corner and disappear into its pages.
I was twelve years old.
To be honest, I probably understood half of what I was reading. But I understood exactly how it made me feel. It made me feel as though there was a larger world than the one I knew. A quieter world. A more thoughtful world. A world where things were made with care, words were chosen carefully, and standards still mattered.
I remember the covers.
Hand-drawn. Elegant. Unhurried. Even before I knew what typography was, I noticed the lettering. It felt deliberate. Nothing shouted for attention. Everything seemed to have earned its place on the page.
Then there were the advertisements.
Lord & Taylor.
Bergdorf Goodman.
Bonwit Teller.
To a boy growing up in Buffalo, those weren’t advertisements. They were postcards from another country. A country I couldn’t imagine ever visiting. I certainly never imagined living there.
Years later, I would spend more than forty years inside that world. Not as a customer. As a steward. Working for brands whose names had once seemed impossibly far away. Looking back now, that still feels improbable.
But here’s what surprises me most.
When I finally stepped behind the curtain, I discovered there wasn’t any magic back there. There were no extraordinary people guarding extraordinary secrets. There were ordinary men and women doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. They arrived prepared. They cared about details. They respected craftsmanship. They kept their word. They held themselves to standards that no one else could see.
The curtain wasn’t hiding magic.
It was hiding standards.
That discovery changed my life. Because suddenly those rooms no longer felt reserved for special people. They felt available to anyone willing to live by the standards required to remain there. Looking back, I realize those weekly issues gave me something much more valuable than inspiration.
They gave me hope.
Hope that my future didn’t have to resemble my past. Hope that there were other ways to live. Hope that discipline, curiosity, and good taste weren’t gifts you were born with. They were choices. I didn’t know it then, but every week I was collecting another postcard.Not from New York.
From my future.
Today, when I sit down to write The Standard, I often think about that boy in the library. Because I’ve realized I’m trying to do for someone else what those anonymous editors, writers, and artists quietly did for me. So when I choose a typeface for a post or the website, I’m thinking of that considered lettering.
When I choose a drawing rather than a photograph for an essay, I’m thinking of those hand-painted covers—and the message they sent to a boy who was paying attention: This was made with care. You are worth the care.
And when I write plainly about discipline, standards, or the ordinary mornings that hold a life together, I’m trying to do for one reader what that magazine did for me: offer the quiet suggestion that there is a more intentional way to live, and that they are not locked out of it.
I’m not trying to impress anyone.
I’m not trying to convince anyone that I’ve figured life out. I’m simply trying to pull back the curtain. To show what forty years of life and a career in luxury taught me. What discipline taught me. What loss taught me. What rebuilding taught me.
Not because my story is unique.
And that’s precisely the point. If an ordinary boy from Buffalo could slowly build a life that once seemed impossibly far away... Then perhaps someone reading these words can too.
Maybe that’s what hope really is.
Not believing that life will suddenly become easy. Believing that your future doesn’t have to be limited by your past. Those weekly issues of The New Yorker and the New York Times gave that to me. Not through grand declarations. Not through self-help.
Quietly.
One issue at a time. Perhaps that’s all any writer can hope to do. Leave a few postcards behind. For someone they will probably never meet. A quiet reminder that there is a larger world than the one they’re standing in today.
And that the door was never locked.
It was simply waiting for someone willing to walk towards it.
Amor Fati.
Until next time,
