The depot in Newton, Kansas was never quiet. Not in my memory, anyway. Trains arrived and departed on a schedule that the whole town organized itself around, and on the platform there was always something worth watching — luggage carts, travelers in good clothes, conductors with the particular authority of men who knew exactly where they were going.
I was a boy then, somewhere in the 1950s, and Newton was where my mother’s family had roots deep enough to hold. Many of them worked the railroad — had worked it for years, would work it for the rest of their lives. The Santa Fe ran through that town like a spine, and my family ran along it.
The most colorful of them was my Uncle Tom. He worked the baggage car, sorted mail on the run between Newton and Kansas City — a large, handsome, physically imposing man who carried himself with the confidence of someone who had never once doubted his place in the world. He was outspoken, outgoing, somewhat feared by some, and not exactly my favorite. But he was vivid in a way that very few people are. Still with me, seventy years later. The kind of man who takes up space in a room and in memory.
I wanted to work on the railroad. That was my dream, standing on that platform as a boy, watching Uncle Tom move through that world like he owned it. The size of the equipment, the noise of the diesel engines, the energy, the sense that something important was always arriving or departing — it got into me and stayed there.
I never worked the railroad. Life went other directions, as it does. But Uncle Tom is still with me, fifty and sixty years later, as vivid as he was on that platform. And here is what troubles me, quietly, on the days I let myself think about it: when I am gone, so is he. So is the depot. So is Newton in the 1950s, with its rhythms and its characters and its particular quality of light.
Unless I write it down.
The Stories That Exist Nowhere Else
Every man reading this is carrying something like that. A place, a person, a season of life that exists now only inside him. A father’s particular way of doing things. A neighborhood that has been demolished or transformed beyond recognition. A friendship that mattered enormously and left no record. A moment of clarity or failure or grace that shaped everything that came after.
These are not small things. They are the substance of a life. And they are mortal in a way that we rarely acknowledge directly: they end when you do, unless you do something about it now.
A growing body of research describes what practitioners call the “ethical will” — a written account not of your assets, but of your values, your stories, your hard-won understanding of what matters. Unlike a legal will, it isn’t about what you leave behind in property. It’s about what you leave behind in meaning. And the men who write them — not for publication, not for anyone’s approval, simply for the record — report something that surprises them: they feel better. More grounded. More certain of who they are and what their life has amounted to.
This is not coincidence. Psychologists who study narrative identity — the way human beings construct a coherent sense of self through story — have found that the act of organizing your own experiences into a written account has measurable effects on wellbeing, on cognitive clarity, and on the sense of purpose that retirement so often quietly erodes.
American Psychological Association has documented the relationship between purposeful creative engagement and psychological health in older adults, and the findings are consistent: men who find meaningful outlets for self-expression in their later years show lower rates of depression, better cognitive function, and a stronger sense of identity independent of their former career titles.
The Productivity Trap
I will be honest with you, because this article would be dishonest if I weren’t: I have been meaning to write my own memoir for years. The desire has always been there. The time has not.
What has consumed my time instead is The Encore Project — this platform, these articles, the work of building something I believe in for men navigating exactly the chapter I am navigating myself. There is an irony in that which is not lost on me. I spend my days encouraging other men to find meaning and purpose and creative expression in their second half, and I keep postponing the single creative act I most want to do for myself.
If that sounds familiar — if you have a memoir, a collection of stories, a letter to your grandchildren, a record of your family’s history that lives permanently in the category of “someday” — I want to suggest gently that someday has a way of not arriving.
The research on this is sobering. Men in retirement who maintain fewer than two or three meaningful activities — creative or otherwise — show significantly higher rates of depression and cognitive decline than those who stay engaged. The brain, deprived of the stimulation and purpose that a career once provided, does not simply rest. It deteriorates. A memoir is not vanity. It is maintenance.
A memoir is not vanity. It is maintenance
You Don't Have to Write a Book
When most men hear the word memoir, they imagine a 300-page manuscript, a literary agent, a publishing deal. That is not what I am suggesting, and it is not what the research recommends.
Start with one story. One person. One place. One season of your life that you have never fully put into words.
Write about the depot in Newton, if that’s your story. Write about your father’s hands, or the first car you owned, or the year everything changed. Write it for your grandchildren, who will never know that world unless you describe it. Write it for yourself, because the act of translating memory into language does something to the memory — it clarifies it, honors it, makes it real in a way that simply carrying it inside you cannot.
The men I most admire in this chapter of life are not the ones who have the most to show for their careers. They are the ones who know who they are — where they came from, what they believe, what they have learned at cost. That knowledge is a creative act. Writing it down is the act of passing it forward.
If you are looking for a place to begin, our Creative Pursuits section has resources for men exploring writing and other forms of creative expression. And the Inspiration & Personal Growth category addresses the deeper questions of meaning and legacy that make this work worth doing.
Uncle Tom and the Vanishing World
I am going to write about Uncle Tom someday. About the depot and the baggage car and the sound of the Santa Fe coming through Newton on a summer afternoon. About what it felt like to be a boy standing on that platform, dreaming of a life that would take me somewhere.
I am going to write about it because no one else can. Because he was not a famous man, and Newton was not a famous town, and the world I am describing exists now only in the memories of the few people still alive who were there. When we are gone, it is gone.
That is true of your world too. The people who raised you. The places that shaped you. The version of America — or wherever you came from — that existed before everything changed. That world is not gone yet. But it will be, unless someone who was there takes the time to set it down.
You are the only one who can do it. And there is no better time than now.
