DeWitt, a town of 5,000 people in Iowa, is not a place that’s well-practiced in the art of welcoming. The locals have deep roots in the town, often several generations old, and it’s one of those places where everyone seems to know everyone else’s story: their family lineage, childhood memories, and even their old high school romances. DeWitters are really good at saying farewell – to those who depart the town limits for bigger opportunities – but “welcome” is a word that they’ve learned to say more in the last few years.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the DeWitt welcoming committee began to form. Even in a rural town like this one, there was a moment of solidarity – to help those in need of a new home and to support the declining population and struggling economy. Angela Boelens, founder of IA Nice, saw an opportunity in hosting refugees and made her case to local businesses for hosting 15 Ukrainian families; within a matter of a year, she was able to raise more than $400,000 to help sponsor, move, and house these new neighbors. By the time our trusty camper van entered the town limits, there were more than 70 Ukrainian refugees who now called DeWitt home.

It wasn’t that DeWitters were unfriendly. They just didn’t have much practice in getting to know someone new. But, with a little encouragement from Angela, they soon got on board. Neighbors gathered to decorate a place for newcomers from Ukraine to live when they first arrived. They baked pies and chocolate chip cookies. They washed the sheets with Downy so they would feel and smell like someone’s home when they arrived. They took the newly-arrived grocery shopping to introduce them to a new way of life. They invested their energy in the intangibles that made a place feel like home.

On a humid Friday afternoon, we rolled into DeWitt to have lunch with Angela and Olena, a refugee who had been living in DeWitt since 2023.

After being introduced to half of the restaurant by Angela (the perks of being from a small town!) I sat next to Olena and I asked her if DeWitt felt like “home.” “When we first arrived,” she said, nodding vigorously, “it absolutely did.”

Because of the welcome from the townspeople and the other Ukrainians there, there was a sense of community. She was out of the war in Kyiv, so she felt physically and emotionally safe. And because she was able to work, she could support her family. She’d worked in real estate in Ukraine and was now applying drywall for a local construction firm. The jobs weren’t the same. Her teen daughter didn’t fit in well in school. And DeWitt, Iowa was nothing like the Friends version of America that they had expected.

But those three needs: a sense of community, physical safety, and financial stability made it feel like home, and for that, she was grateful. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the diminishment of physical safety meant Kyiv could no longer be home.

But things changed in 2025. Work authorization for hundreds of thousands of refugees, including Olena, expired, not to be renewed by the presidential administration. Suddenly, Olena, her family, and her broader community could no longer work. They weren’t generating income. They couldn’t make their mortgage payments for the houses they had purchased. The financial security that made DeWitt feel like home dissolved in a matter of weeks.

And with that turn, the feelings on Ukraine started to change. The solidarity diminished.

There was an incident at the local winery, where two gubernatorial candidates stood up to speak. One claimed that Ukrainians were anti-Christian and didn’t deserve a place in America. The next candidate upped the rhetoric to compete. A few community leaders defended them, but most people stayed silent amid the total political about-face.

After the event, a friend of the community cornered the second gubernatorial candidate and told him: “There are 70 Ukrainians living here in DeWitt, and they are lovely people. You should meet them.”

He shouted expletives at her, lumbered into his truck, and drove away.

A community that wanted them here so badly that they raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and washed sheets in Downy was now listening to rhetoric about Ukrainians being unwelcome.

These days, without the ability to work and pay her mortgage, Olena doesn’t feel at home anymore. She doesn’t know where to go. And she’s not alone. With the recent Supreme Court ruling that will likely have implications for the more than 1.3 million temporary protected status holders across America, our neighbors and community members are asking themselves: “Where can I find home?”

This week, America turns 250 years old. The land of the free, the home of the brave. Our land and our home.

I keep getting stuck on that one word: home.

When work on Mt. Rushmore began in 1927, Calvin Coolidge gave a tribute to our past Presidents and described a country built on balance: Washington’s liberty, Jefferson’s self-government, Lincoln’s union, Roosevelt’s economic freedom.

Independence, forever on a see-saw with interdependence. Responsibility to your fellow man balanced against pure American ingenuity and ambition. The American story has always asked us to balance self-reliance with our responsibility to take care of one another.

In the 99 years since Rushmore broke ground, we remain a country built on a see-saw of balanced values.

But see-saws only work if there are two sides.

A year later, Olena is still in DeWitt. But the sheets no longer smell like Downy. There are no pies at her doorstep. Just a looming deadline that will determine where her family will live next.

This week, she’ll watch the fireworks burst in tribute to the land of the free, the home of the brave. She, alongside millions of other refugees, is brave. But she is no longer free. And she no longer knows where home will be.

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More on human connection across America:

On sharing what you love: Miss Alice and Carl

On seeing ourselves in others: David

On sharing time: Miss Angie

On hospitality: Kristen and Justin

On welcoming strangers: George

I should have been worrying about my daughter getting bitten by a snake at this moment. And, yes, I was.

But something else was also nagging at me.

My bill.

Or rather, my lack of a bill.

We were camping on Kristen’s land for free, and I couldn’t understand why. Usually, it cost us $100 to camp our van on a campground. Why didn’t she want the money? My dog was roaming around on their land with her dogs, like he was one of the pack. Was this ok? Should I put him in his crate in the van?

She gave us a full spread of snacks when we got in. Was I supposed to pay her something? Reciprocate? Did we even have anything left from the last Wal Mart pitstop?

I was sweaty, physically, and uncomfortable, socially.

I didn’t understand free Virginia farm customs. What was the etiquette here? Was I rude for not bringing a gift?

As soon as the snacks were done, Kristen insisted that me and the girls leave our hot, humid van for a buggy tour of her sprawling 1,600 acres of Virginia forest. Her enthusiasm for the land was palpable and infectious. She was raised in Washington, DC and came to Virginia for college. She fell in love with the land, the horses, and Justin, her husband now. She never went back home. This land became home. It was hard not to smile no matter how many dogwoods she showed us. It was like she was a teenager, showing you a scrapbook of every clipped magazine picture she could find of the latest heart throb.

“Oh, I wish you could have seen it just a few weeks ago,” she says, disappointed for a brief moment. “The hills were just covered in our blooms. It was all white. Like Virginia snow.”

Over 90 minutes, she encouraged us to jump into streams, she pointed out woodpeckers, and she showed us her home. We met her horses, delighted that one of them was also named Tater. She pointed into the distance to where Justin’s dad, mom, sister, brother, aunt, great aunt, and great uncle all live in nearby plots of land, creating a commune that many of us can only dream of living on.

“Come check out these bear prints!” she said, smiling over her shoulder and motioning my daughters over. “Look how big their paws are!”

You got the feeling that even if we weren’t there, this is how she’d be spending her day.

And yet, I could not shake the feeling that we were a nuisance. That we were inconveniencing her from doing the things she wanted to do. And I kept thinking about the imaginary, non-existent tab.

We already had a free night stay. Free snacks. And now a 90-minute sightseeing tour? If I’d booked this through a guide, this could have cost us $75. I did the math. Our non-tab was running at about $210 by now.

I kept thinking the same five words: What’s in it for her?

Later that evening, Kristen made our entire family a delicious dinner and invited some of her family over too. She told us more about hosting people like us.

“When we moved to this farm, the only people I would talk to were my husband, my dad, and my kids,” she says. “Since I started hosting last year, people come by most days in the summer. We get to meet new people every day. It’s so fun for me.”

“We’ve met people from Uganda, Kenya, and the Netherlands,” Justin added. “It’s opened up our world beyond this farm.”

Fascinating, but I was still doing the math in my head as I ate. She’d even accommodated our dietary restrictions. Sure, we paid her daughter for horse riding lessons, but I just felt like I wasn’t contributing my share.

Should we have brought something for dinner? The nearest grocery store was at least 25 minutes away. How could we do that? I was failing at being a polite guest.

At that exact moment, Justin let a “damnit” slip, and my 9-year old said: “You owe me $1 for the curse jar!” He laughed and reached for his wallet. The idea of adding to my debt almost made me jump out of my chair. I quickly refused on her behalf with a tight smile, shooting her a look. Ignoring me, she recounted the fee-per-curse word structure for him for future reference. ($50 for the f-word?) Unbelievable. I was sitting here, my brain filling in an imaginary spreadsheet, trying to figure out how to repay these debts, and my kid was negotiating a cost-per-curse-word fee.

After dinner, we helped them clean up (Ha ha! I was balancing the scales!) and spent a few minutes watching Family Feud with Kristen’s dad. Eric and the girls then walked out to play softball in the twilight and Justin grabbed his mitt too.

“Mind if I join ya?”

The four of them sauntered into an honest-to-God, Norman Rockwell painting. They spent the next hour standing in the shape of a square, chucking the ball from one person to the next. Justin taught my 7-year old how to throw a curveball. Justin spoke about how his daughter played shortstop like my 9-year old, and how her team had won state championships.

“I love playing ball so much,” Justin says, throwing the ball to Iyla. “My problem was that I was a genius with the mitt but couldn’t hit the ball for the life of me.”

I sat on a checkered picnic blanket with my dog, watching them. It was hard to conjure up a more American moment than this. Me and Tater on a farm in Virginia surrounded by fireflies, with my daughters learning to throw softballs at dusk from a farmer named Justin who was struggling not to say the f-word so he wasn’t charged $50 by my little California hustlers.

It was like I psychologically split in two at that moment. I both wanted to soak in the purity and the wholesomeness of this scene. The feeling of openness I felt with this family, this land, the animals… to it all.

But also, I still couldn’t keep doing the math. These kids were now getting a softball lesson! And Tater had essentially had a full day of doggie day care running around the farm all day, being looked after by the other dogs.

It had to be close to $400 by now.

We were strangers. They didn’t know us. We were Californians from across the country. We would probably never see one another again.

What were they getting out of this?

As dusk fell, Justin thanked us: “I don’t get to do this anymore. My kids are 18 and 21. I miss these days. You brought them back for me.”

Kristen hosted people on this farm because she shared company with people she’d otherwise never meet, and she’d spent the day telling me how meaningful our visit was for them. Justin said it had opened up his world. He got to play catch again and relive the memories of his kids being young.

But as I got ready for bed, I stared down at my Venmo app on my phone. Did connecting with new people have a price tag? A value?

We had just shared an incredible day with complete strangers. But why could I not help but ask: “How much do I owe you?”

Rebuilding the ways in which we connect with one another:

On welcoming strangers: George

On sharing what you love: Miss Alice and Carl

On seeing ourselves in others: David

On sharing time: Miss Angie

On showing up: The women of Cafe Appalachia

After spending the night camping on Lake Erie, we traveled down to Sandusky, Ohio, to fulfill a promise to our kids: an afternoon at Cedar Point, the “Roller Coaster Capital of the World.” It was not lost on me that we’d spent dozens of hours touring museums and historical landmarks over the past month, yet the glee of riding upside down on a rickety rollercoaster would be THE core memory from this trip.

We had suffered through a few nights of simmering in a metal can of a camper van, so it was time for a change. A luxurious one. A classic Midwest motel with showers, air conditioning, and maybe a full night of sleep. At this point in our journey, treat yo’self moments came in all forms.

As we crossed Sandusky city lines, the van erupted in cheers. Rollercoasters! Air conditioning! Personal space! Opening the van doors and tumbling through the wall of heat, we entered the lobby of the hotel. This space was different. It had no concierge stand or even a reception desk. There was a smattering of brightly colored couches and just one person: a man in a loose gray muscle tee scrolling TikTok in a blinkless trance, slouching on the couch in the center of the room.

“Can you please help me check in?” Eric asked.

“Naw, I’m just the maintenance man,” he said, not looking up. “You need to check in with our app.”

“What app?” Eric asked. The man nudged his chin outside.

Shaking his head, Eric went outside to find the QR code to download the app. Except the code didn’t work. He squinted, followed the fine print at the bottom of the sign, and called an out-of-area-code phone number to talk to an actual human.

“What’s the code to get into our room?” Eric asked into the phone. “Reservation under Eric.”

“You need to download the app,” the voice on the other end responded.

“The app isn’t working. I just want to get in my room. It’s 105 degrees,” he said in a faux-patient tone as he grumbled under his breath.

“Okay, let me make a room code for you,” said the anonymous voice on the other side of the line. A few minutes later, Eric’s phone dinged with a six-digit code to punch into the door.

Eric and I wanted to stay in that A/C room for the rest of the day, but the Roller Coaster Capital of the World beckoned, and our children would not let us miss out. When we arrived in the late afternoon, excited and sweating, there was no staff to be seen. We went to Guest Services to ask how to buy tickets.

“Well, you’re late,” the man said. “We opened at ten a.m. It’s four p.m.”

“There’s no one in the ticket booth,” Eric said. “Can you just help us out?”

“Just buy your tickets online. You’ll save money and then you can just let yourself in.” He went back to playing a game on his phone.

We bought tickets online and went through the turnstile.

“Do you have any recommendations for the first roller coasters we should try?” I asked the person working at the turnstile.

“I don’t know,” they said. “I don’t like rollercoasters. I just work here.”

When my mom arrived in America in 1974, she struggled to find a job, so she went door-to-door, dropping off her resume to whomever would take it. Thanks to a referral from a new friend, she landed an unpaid internship at NASA’s Moffett Field Research Center.

Every morning, my mom took Caltrain from San Mateo to Mountain View and then walked three miles to the lab in her heavy silk sari, in the hot sun, carrying a large black umbrella. The sight of a woman carrying a giant Mary Poppins-like umbrella to block the sunshine was rarely seen, so she was subject to stares, honks, points, and the occasional laugh. A few months into her internship, George, a senior scientist in her lab, mentioned that he’d seen her walking every morning. He offered to give her a ride to and from work in his Buick. My mom wouldn’t accept a free ride, so she insisted on paying him $1 a day for gas. He refused, but every Friday she still gave him $5. This was 1974, the year of the oil crisis, after all.

George and my mom forged a fascinating friendship. On their trips to NASA, they’d talk about India, about his love for travel, about science. He wound up becoming an important friend and ally for her through her career, serving as a rare, trusted bridge outside her cocoon of Indian friends. For the next fifty years, my parents would receive handwritten letters and holiday cards from him and his wife, Adele. They’d get invited to fancy dinners at their home in San Francisco, a reality far from our community’s suburban potluck parties.

In 2017, I joined my parents in visiting George in Sonoma. At his home, he shared his art, his old travel books, and his 98 years of wisdom with us. We admired his midcentury furniture, impeccably preserved like it was still 1974. We went to his favorite lunch spot, and he drove my mom, for old time’s sake, in his gigantic Cadillac. This time, I insisted on paying for lunch. If he was reluctant to receive gas money back then, it was the least he could accept now.

As we said goodbye in the driveway of his home, my mom promised George she’d come back to celebrate his 100th birthday. He smiled, nodded, and promised to keep in touch. The next year, she didn’t get the regular calls or holiday card from him, and a quick Google search surfaced that he had passed away at the ripe age of 99. As she called to tell me the news, there was the regret lingering on the line – of wishing she could have said goodbye and thank him one more time for welcoming her to this new land.

When we left Sandusky, we drove south through Ohio and stopped for lunch in Xenia, also known as “the city of hospitality.” Xenia comes from the Greek word philoxenia, which means the love of strangers. The ancient Greeks believed a traveler at your door could be a God in disguise, so you welcomed them as such. Everyone is worthy of a welcome.

More and more, the act of welcoming has become monetized, and hospitality has been swapped for transaction. A swipe, a click, or a download is far easier to do than calling a friend for help. The act of driving someone to the airport became Uber. Crashing on a couch or staying a weekend became Airbnb. Checking into a hotel became an app that didn’t work in 105-degree heat. Convenience has made us more self-reliant, but when hospitality is replaced by a swipe or a download, an important human moment gets lost. When we prioritize control over vulnerability, we become less patient with one another, and less able to see ourselves in strangers.

Back in 1974, George never needed a word for what he did. He just saw a woman walking three miles in a silk sari in the California heat and stopped.

Related pieces:

On hospitality: Miss Alice and Carl

On seeing ourselves in others: David

On time generosity: Miss Angie

On pulling up a chair: Tommy and Dixie

On presence: The women of Cafe Appalachia

We arrived at the farm an hour late (see: unpaved roads riddled with potholes), covered in sweat, wheat, and red dirt. As I shifted Vanna Gray to park, Alice, the farm owner, peered into our camper van like she was the grandmother we’d been coming to see. She broke out into a big smile and chirped at the girls, “Hi, beautiful! Why don’t you come with me and help me figure out where we’re going to park this thing?” pointing to the van.

Without hesitation, the girls hopped out of the van and piled into her Ford F150 without even a look back or wave.

Put on your seatbelts!

I’m right behind you!

Watch out for your little sister!

I wanted to shout all of the crazy things that run through a mother’s head when her kids leave her sight. In this case, I had no idea what I was supposed to say as I watched my kids pile into a stranger’s truck. Be cool, I told myself. It was a little tough in this West Virginia heat.

I looked around the 300 acres at the top of this mountain and thought: Where on Earth are we? How damn big is America? There was just so much to it that I had never thought of before. No matter how much we drove, it just kept going on, up mountains and down to valleys and to oceans and into desolate flatlands.

A long ten minutes later, Alice’s F150 came back with the kids in tow. The girls jumped out of the truck, yelling “Goats! Sheep! Eggs! Bye!” before they sprinted through the waist-high fields to check out the animals and the chicken coop. Two weeks on the road, and they were regular farmhands at this point. I threw the keys to Eric to park Vanna Gray and joined them.

“Husband!” Alice yelled, and Carl – the husband – lumbered out of their home. He took us to a pen filled with dozens of goats, sheep, a cow, a baby cow, and more chickens than I could count. He gave us pellets to feed everyone and introduced us to all of them by name.

Those, there are the calf’s parents, this one-a o’er here’s gonna get weaned, but you know how mothers are, can’t stop nursing her kids so we gotta separate ‘em, ya see?

All one long sentence of folksy farm wisdom.

Carl showed the girls how to remove eggs from the coops, pointing out the fertilized eggs that were about to hatch.

See them ones o’er here? They’re marked up with pen. They be hatchin’ in the next day 'er so. You may be able to see it happen. They’re real cute when they come out.

“What’s the cow’s name?” I naively asked.

“She ain’t gotta name,” Carl answered.

Oh right, this was a cattle farm.

After this outrageously generous 4-H 101 afternoon, Alice said she’d drop a fire pit and some chairs for us to admire the sunset over dinner.

“You can leave whenever you want,” she said. “Tomorrow. Next week. Even next month if you like it that much. Out here, where we’re from, you can come when you want, you can stay however long you want. Except for our trips to doctor’s appointments, that’s how we live our lives. Just come and go. Just enjoy this land.”

My father arrived in America on such an enormous leap of faith and was met with a remarkable act of hospitality.

He moved in with Natarajan, his friend from India who already lived in Chicago. Natarajan didn’t just give him a place to sleep, but he quite literally helped my father find his feet in America. My dad had never walked on ice or snow before and didn’t know how to navigate a Chicago winter without falling.

“You put your feet close to each other, so that you won’t fall down,” he says five decades later sitting in my dining room, shuffling his feet under the dining table. “I had never learned that. He taught me.”

I tried to picture a 29-year-old version of my dad, fresh off the plane from India, before me or my brother, before he’d met my mom, having flown across the world, $3,000 in debt from his plane ticket, with the hope of finding a job in this strange place. Where even the ground wasn’t firm beneath his feet, and his friend, Natarajan, teaching him to keep his feet close together so he wouldn’t fall as he traveled between job interviews.

Instead, I saw my father at 72. He’d just had a massive heart attack and lost his ability to walk and was learning how for the third time, this time with doctors, his family, and even more Indian friends surrounding him. We were all encouraging him to put one foot in front of the other, to balance, to shuffle his feet again so he wouldn’t fall down.

Many of the friends who helped him re-learn how to walk were found by paging through the phonebook until he found South Indian names. He stopped at Kannan, then at Rajaraman, then at Ratnam. He called them all and said in Tamil, “I am here from India and new here. I’d like to talk to you about California.”

They’d invite him over for dinner and he’d have them over for dinner. He was a bachelor, so his version of hosting was warming up frozen dinners and serving them on Corelle plates. There was zero pretension. There was no need for formality. A name he recognized as South Indian and Tamil on the other end of the phone line was enough.

My dad had left an entire trust-based village that had been shaped and woven together over generations back in India, with its shared religion, histories, language, customs and traditions. He knew what he was coming toward, but he didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of what he was leaving behind. So here he was, weaving together his own new cocoon from scratch in this strange land, string by string, connection by connection, just paging through the phone book for South Indian names and then meeting over microwaved frozen dinners.

Back in West Virginia, later that night, when Miss Alice dropped off the fire pit, the cooking stove, and the chairs for us to sit around and use to enjoy the sunset, I asked her how she wound up in West Virginia.

Carl (aka “Husband”) worked for the King family, the prior owners of the farm. As the Kings got older and their health declined, they gifted 310 acres of the farm to Carl.

Alice had peered into our camper van and seen my daughters’ sweetness and curiosity and wanted to show them her farm, the way the Kings recognized Carl’s hard work and dedication, and wanted to share the farm once they could no longer use it.

“They said that God told them that Carl needed to have it next,” she said. “He wanted to pay for it. They wouldn’t let him. That’s why we let people stay here. To enjoy the beauty that we were gifted with ourselves.”

She talked about the land like it was family, painting the picture of generations, of sickness and health, of richer and poorer. One thing was for sure though: The land was not there as purely a resource to be mined.

“I have people here trying to convince me to get all them electric hookups and charging stations,” she said of people trying to convince her to monetize the land as an RV park, “This land is to be enjoyed, not to make money.”

We arrived only with pickles and yogurt. We had no idea that the drive down to the nearest grocery store would take nearly 45 minutes. But it didn’t matter. The land provided for us, too, now that we were on it. Alice brought the eggs the girls had gathered, some butter her Amish friend had churned, and a pound of steak for Eric from their farm.

Hospitality was far simpler than I had once believed. It wasn’t about hosting the perfect dinner party. It was the act of welcoming someone and sharing something you deeply loved. Alice had never thought about it any other way.

“God bless you,” she said, walking back toward her farmhouse. “Enjoy the sunset!”

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If you enjoyed reading about hospitality, you might also enjoy:

On seeing ourselves in others: David

On time generosity: Miss Angie

On pulling up a chair: Tommy and Dixie

On presence: The women of Cafe Appalachia

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I witnessed a dramatic eruption on a hike near my home in Oakland, just after Slack, the company I worked for, sold to Salesforce for $28 billion, not long after it went public. Two milestones that gave you gold stars in the tech industry.

I turned a corner and my dog, Tater, and I accidentally stumbled into thousands of ladybugs waking up from hibernation, a wall of orange flutter. Hundreds of ladybugs covered us from head-to-paw, crawling over us after awakening from their deep winter slumber. An otherworldly, magical experience like being immersed in a fairy-world that might only exist in my kids’ imagination. I stood there, letting them swarm around us, taking in the beautiful strangeness, until they all eventually started to disperse from the clusters and fly off into the world.

I walked away, gently picking away the final few ladies off of Tater’s ears and my wool sweater. I was wondering when the last time I had experienced something so awe-inducing and unique had been—and just a mile from my home on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.

Had this always been here?

Had I been too busy hustling all this time to see it?

I turned the corner and saw a woman walking towards me with headphones on, tapping away on her phone on—I’m not kidding—Slack.

“Hey!” I said, waving to get her attention. “There are thousands of ladybugs waking up from hibernation over there! It’s so cool! You’ve got to go see this! It’s magical!” My voice screeched a few pitches above normal.

She glanced up from her phone, hesitated for a long second, and then yanked her headphones out of her ears, looking at me with exhausted disdain. She asked me to repeat myself. When I did, she dramatically sighed and said, “You made me take my headphones out for that?” She grumbled, shook her head, put her headphones back in, and went back to typing and walking. A hiking trail was where work happens, I guess.

I had sat through years of executive meetings where we all high-fived ourselves when our customers claimed that they “literally could not work or live without Slack.” We didn’t fear competition from a giant like Microsoft because our customers just loved us so much. The numbers proved it.

But was this thing I just saw love? Or was it something else?

Soon after that hike, I left my job and the industry that came with it. I scrubbed away all of the grease that made my life feel frictionless — my social media accounts, my corporate persona, my productivity hacks. I tried international travel, attempted new hobbies, and read every book on connection and happiness I could find. Nothing seemed to work. Jumping in a camper van to find the parts of America where connection still came first was the only obvious next step.

Rolling into South Charleston, West Virginia, we stopped for lunch at Cafe Appalachia, a restaurant that promised the fresh vegetables that we hadn’t eaten in days. As I opened up the van door to let in the muggy summer air, Tater lurched and growled at a man who was smoking a cigarette while staring aimlessly at the sky. His face was tattooed from crown to chin, with devil horns accentuating his eyebrows, and his beard was braided meticulously into a forward-facing rat tail. I tried to counter my dog’s unfriendliness with my now tried-and-true recipe for welcoming myself to a new place: A smile, head nod, a wave, and a loud “hello!” After 3,000 miles of iterating, my magic formula had worked well… until now. The man sneered at me with dead eyes, showing his teeth back to Tater, and growled “Whatchoo looking at?” Yikes. Must. walk. away.

Our lunch destination was a church converted into a cafe, and the front door welcomed us with a faded yellow placard that read: “We Carry Naloxone” in stout black letters. The bulletin board in the entry was papered with notices of Al-Anon meetings, mental health counseling, and tips for how to deal with sudden overdoses. I quickly realized this wasn’t a local joint to just grab a salad. It was a restaurant dedicated to helping recovering addicts re-enter the world through stable employment. The employees – all women and former addicts – wore crisp black T-shirts printed with messages like “I Am Worthy” and “I Am Valued.” I tried the Sheela head-nod-hello special – questions about what brought them to this place, their experience working there – but they answered every question with a short “yes, ma’am” or “no, ma’am” and kept their eyes downcast. One woman started talking about her apprenticeship with the organization that ran the cafe, but seemed to run out of energy halfway through her sentence and reverted her focus to chopping lettuce.

My checklist of icebreakers quickly melted. I looked up.

The eyes of the woman behind the counter reminded me of my grandma’s, once alive and sparkling, but flattened after my aunt died at the age of 32. I could see the layers of grief darkening her eyes, despite the cobalt blue eyeliner rimming her lids. The woman to the left of her had tired lines etched around her young face. It looked like the experience and depth of her years were double the actual years she’d spent on Earth. Their colleague had high, gaunt cheekbones that were pale and almost grey, like a parasite had sucked out any joy or color from her life.

But these women were here. They were attempting their own awakening, their own personal eruptions – to leave the dark days behind them.

The open kitchen lacked the usual clatter of a restaurant, replaced with a code of head nods. The women plated dishes and chopped vegetables alongside one another with silent cues. In that space, it was as if they were letting one another know that they were valued and they were worthy to each other — without even needing the T-shirt.

“What’s an addiction?” Iyla, my 7-year old, asked me, as we ate our lunch outside, admiring the vegetable garden that produced our salads. I swatted away a mosquito swarming her head in the afternoon heat, only to watch it land on my arm and take a sip.

“It’s when you take a medicine and can’t stop taking it after the pain or sickness goes away.”

“I hate medicine. Why do companies create things that people don’t want to stop taking?”

She paused for a few seconds.

“It’s cool that they quit.”

A few feet away, a ladybug landed on the edge of her plate, then lifted off into the humid West Virginia air. She turned her head upward with a big grin and watched it flit away.

At the age of seven, she knew how to look up better than anyone else I knew.

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Other pieces that I’d love for you to read:

“He won’t remember me tomorrow.”

“Was she the worst or the best waitress?”

“The 1,600 mile sprint.”

Introducing “America Through the Looking Glass.”

I was in my driveway in Oakland, frozen to the beige leather driver’s seat. This all seemed a lot more doable before this moment.

But now it was real. We had rented a camper van, which was now packed full of our stuff, our daughters were clutching crisp $20 bills our neighbors had given them for on-the-road ice cream purchases, and we had the first few days of our trip mapped out.

This wasn’t your normal summer trip. Eric, the girls, Tater Tot, and I had cleared our June and July to drive through America in search of connection and safety.

Was this pit in my stomach good fear or bad fear?

The planning was fun. Getting out of my Volvo that I had just parked in our driveway and into the van on that late-May night? Less so.

What was I thinking? Why did I tell so many people I was doing this? I couldn’t back out now. But I also couldn’t seem to get out of our SUV and into the rented camper.

I rolled down the window on the driver’s side, stuck inside like I’d been physically sewn into the leather seat.

“I’m really nervous,” I said to Eric. “It feels like it’s going to be really, really hard.”

“We’re discovering America!” he replied with his typical unflappable, salt-of-the-earth, only-Eric bravado. “We will make it fun. Come on, let’s go.“

He touched my elbow and tugged on my sleeve. I glanced over at our new “home” through the Volvo’s windshield and chuckled while Tater darted out of the camper van with a nervous leap and planted himself on the porch in front of our home. “I feel you, boy,” I thought. That’s where I wanted to be. As close to my home as possible.

I wanted to tell myself I was overreacting. This was just America. I had spent my 20s staying out until 2am in places like Johannesburg, Manila, and Mumbai.

But the conversations I’d had leading up to this trip didn’t give me a lot of comfort. As I told people about our adventures, I noticed a visible shift in body language.

“Wait, you’re bringing your young children with you?” they’d ask. “In a camper van? Across America? In this political climate? How old are they?”

“Expect some stares. People won’t know what to make of your family!”

It hadn’t really occurred to me to do this trip without my kids because they were the entire point. I couldn’t let my fear be the reason for keeping them in our cocoon and raising stunted caterpillars. I needed to find another way to teach them to connect with others, without relying on TikTok or Instagram as the strands that linked them to the world.

I took a deep breath.

It was too late for second thoughts. I guess if my parents could cross an ocean, I could cross the state line, I thought. I pulled on Tater’s leash and we both reluctantly climbed into the van.

**

While we didn’t have a set itinerary for the entire trip, we did have a lot of ground to cover in those early days: four states in two days, two festivals to attend, dozens of history lessons, several natural wonders to visit, and hundreds of people to meet.

Carrying our temporary home on our backs like a camper van snail we named Vanna Gray. Stopping at Love’s gas stations and wherever else we could to sleep, refuel, and maybe shower. We were going to be efficient. We were going to make it around America, connect with strangers, and enjoy every minute of it.

We didn’t have to drive too far to get out of our comfort zone. Small things. Doing sunrise yoga in the parking lot of a Walmart. Entering a cafe in Lovelock, Nevada, with Newsmax blaring news of immigration raids. Traversing Nevada down a two-lane road once called “America’s Loneliest Highway” with billboards as our cultural conversation partner.

The trip’s early days felt like checking off boxes. Getting the right photos, videos, and stories to bring back home. Being productive and crossing things off of the list, but not necessarily feeling much from it.

As we sat in the Waffle House in Amarillo with Miss Angie as our waitress, I stared down at the crumpled lavender dress I was wearing, now laced with sticky table syrup from a kid’s fingers. I lamented to Eric that we could travel through America and have zero meaningful conversations with the strangers that we were supposed to meet.

While we sat at our table, waiting for our order, I looked over and saw a couple, likely in their late 80s, sitting across the aisle from us. Tommy, the man, wore a hat with “Vietnam” and “Marine Corps” embroidered on it and munched on his bacon and eggs silently. His wife, Dixie, wore a faded American flag t-shirt and sported lilac Crocs. I kept staring at that hat and at him and Dixie and imagining their lives and who they were. As a kid who grew up during the invasion of Kuwait and protested the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in my 20s, my patriotism is largely rooted in USAID and the Peace Corps. I’m proud when America does peaceful things in the world.

Still, I was looking at someone who had fought and could have died for a country that welcomed my parents and that ultimately gave me a life I couldn’t have had in India, whether I would have agreed with that war or not. Whether I would agree with him politically today or not.

I was here to get out of my comfort zone, right? But what did I, a vegetarian Californian who was too conflict-averse to even ask for my correct breakfast order, have in common with the folks here at the Waffle House in Amarillo?

Miss Angie had told a table of strangers her troubles. I could do this. I needed to do this. If I wasn’t good with small talk, I was great with generosity. Midway through our meal, I awkwardly stood up and walked over to Tommy and Dixie’s table. I rehearsed what to say so many times in my head, but it still sounded so forced and strained when I said it: “Thank you for your service to our country. I’d like to cover your bill.”

I’d never done anything like this before. My hands were shaking. Tommy looked at me, surprised, paused for a minute, and then nodded. “Our bill? Okay, sure!” he responded. He clearly wasn’t quite sure what to make of this woman wearing a rumpled linen dress who seemingly appeared out of nowhere to cover a check. Dixie grinned and grabbed my hands out of gratitude. It was at that moment when I realized I should probably ask their names and introduce myself: “I’m Sheela, and my family and I are here from California, driving through this country.” At that point, my palms went clammy and my social awkwardness hit peak levels. I repeated their names, nodded my head, awkwardly smiled, and walked away back to our booth. As I turned, Dixie opened her mouth and paused like she wanted to say something, but wasn’t quite sure what else to say. She gave me a small wave of gratitude. After they finished their meals, they came over to our table, introduced themselves to Eric, shook our hands, and thanked us again.

As we left the Waffle House, I was unsettled. We were now six days in, not even a full week, but we felt so far away from home. We had done so much, but how much had we really felt?

I was still waiting for some big thing to happen. By paying for someone’s meal, perhaps I could have one of those epiphanies. By putting myself out there, I’d embrace the good fear and maybe I’d get some big a-ha. Some big conversation. Some big event. A one-line thesis on what connection means in today’s world.

But all it felt was unnatural. “Why did you feel awkward? You did something kind,” Eric said as we walked through the parking lot in the arid Texas heat.

“I don’t know. It felt performative. Like I was checking a box. ‘Be generous.’ Check. I rehearsed what to say six times and it still came out wrong. My hands were shaking.”

“Your hands were shaking because you cared,” he said. “That’s not performative.”

“I didn’t even stay to talk to them. I paid their bill and went back to my seat. I didn’t ask him about Vietnam. I could have even asked if they were from Amarillo. I just stood there expecting something to happen and when it didn’t, I retreated.”

I paused for a minute and Eric sat with me in silence. “It felt like I was proving my Americanness. Like I’ve been so uncomfortable these last few days because I don’t do the small talk as well. I’m a vegetarian. I can’t talk about hunting or country music. I feel like I’m digging myself out of this California hole, but I don’t know how — because I was born and raised in California!”

He paused and touched my arm. “You did a nice thing, and they appreciated it. Maybe just leave it at that. A nice deed for a stranger.”

I knew he was right. But I also knew that what I’d done was throw money at a moment instead of showing up for it. Tommy and Dixie would likely have appreciated me sitting down and talking to them as much as me just covering a bill. They didn’t need a GoFundMe for a Waffle House breakfast.

How would things change if I loosened my relationship with connection as something less curated and safe? Would I feel something then?

I was frozen in the passenger seat, this time in Amarillo. We had traveled 1,600 miles, but I felt like I hadn’t moved at all.

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“Now, girls,” the waitress at the Waffle House in Amarillo told my kids. “This is our anthem around here. Have you heard it before?”

A twangy man was singing through the tinny speaker at the restaurant. It was barely audible over the waitress’ booming voice, but we were safe in saying no. We were not a family of country music fans.

“It’s called ‘Texas!’” she exclaimed, with a grin slowly taking over her face.

We sang along loudly, following Miss Angie’s lead:

“She’s probably in Texas

Amarillo, all I know

George Strait said it

Yeah, that’s where all them exes go”

“You know them Blake Shelton?” she continued.

That was Blake? Blake we knew. We were big fans of “The Voice.”

My family had been on the road in our camper van, sleeping mostly in Walmart parking lots, for a few days now. Miss Angie wasn’t the only one to take one look at us and say, “You don’t seem to be from these parts…where y’all from?”

The answer, whether it was “Oakland” or “The Bay Area” or simply “California,” always drew mixed responses.

But Miss Angie, in her mid-70s, arms covered in liver spots, wearing her Waffle House apron and carrying her tattered notepad, just broke out into a huge smile.

“My daughter took me on vacation in California once,” she said. “It’s real nice there.”

“How’d you land in Amarillo?” Eric asked.

Miss Angie told us her story as she refreshed our coffees, waters, and lemonades, leaning on the table, pausing here and there to head-nod at a familiar guest as they came in. How she was a mom of six kids, why she and her youngest son needed a fresh start in a new place. For decades she’d worked at a Waffle House in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Her decision to just transfer to one in Texas.

A Waffle House is a Waffle House, right? She already knew the menu and the system. She already had the shirt, apron, and name badge.

“So, we looked at a map, moved my finger east on Highway 40, and landed on the Waffle House in Amarillo,” she said. That was it.

Her story was not unlike my father’s immigration story from India. His exact destination also wasn’t all that well-planned. He knew America was the end goal, but it could have well been any city here. Her destination, too, was totally random, as long as it was anywhere along Highway 40 that had a Waffle House and wasn’t Murfreesboro. Both just wanted opportunity, a job, and a fresh start.

“When I told my boss that I was leaving the Waffle House in Murfreesboro, he was sad,” she said. “We’d been working together for a long time.”

She held a slight regret in her voice. She looked away and took a breath to compose herself. The smile came back on, almost too quickly.

“But it was real kind. He wanted to support me, so he bought all my furniture, my house plants, and my appliances as a way to help me. He wanted to make sure that he showed up for me as I said goodbye.”

Miss Angie had a way with people. It wasn’t the overt charisma or magnetism you might find at TGIFridays, although once a customer captured her singing and dancing and posted it online.

“You know that I’m on the YouTube, girls, right?”

But generally, her charm was more understated than something showy and viral. She would tell you her story – the worst parts of it. The things I would have censored from a Facebook post shared with my closest friends. And she wanted to hear all about you. It didn’t matter that it took time, her tables turned slower, or she forgot your refill.

Was her “job” really serving food or comfort? Was the Waffle House a place to eat or gather? As I watched my kids eat their breakfasts (with mine nowhere in sight), while Miss Angie told us her story… I wasn’t honestly sure if she was the worst waitress or the best waitress we’d had on this trip so far.

When I finally got my breakfast, it wasn’t even what I ordered. But there were plenty of people who got all four of us our food on time over the past week, but this was the restaurant experience that stuck with us all. We felt treated like family. You might not get what you ordered at home either.

“Do you miss Tennessee?” I asked her.

“Last week, I was depressed,” she said, looking down. She wiped the counter with her towel and flipped pages in her notepad. She cleared her throat. “I miss home. I miss the rolling hills. I miss the water. It’s where I come from. But now this is home. We saved up money, my son and me. Now we’ve moved from an apartment to a house. We have our very own house here.”

She grinned proudly. “We can call it our own.”

We congratulated her, and she finally noticed the absence of my chocolate chip pancakes.

“Oh no, I’m sitting here chatting away, and I need to get you your right order!” She swatted with her notepad at nothing and hurried off. She yelled the order to the cook at the stove.

“Everyone has so much time here,” my 9-year-old said, chomping loudly between her bites.

There was the young cashier at Walmart who patiently waited with my stuff when I forgot my credit card in Fernley, Nevada. There was the man who walked with me to look for Tater’s lost poop-bag-holder in Fruita, Colorado. There was the gray-haired gentleman who had insisted on guiding us in parking the camper van at the Love’s rest stop in Dalhart, Texas. The camaraderie built during the hour-long wait for some reheated frozen crinkly fries at the burger food truck in Amarillo the evening before. There was Buc-ee’s, a gas station of American abundance, where no one seemed to be in any particular hurry as they pored over fudge or BBQ.

It was so different from our lives back at home. If I said someone at a retail store “patiently” did anything in the Bay Area, it would mean they pursed their lips and tolerated my fumbling inability to execute a transaction as efficiently as the local social contract allowed. But at the Walmart in Nevada, this woman was genuinely happy to hold my stuff all day long until I could get my hands on a real plastic credit card somewhere in my suitcase in the van.

At home, we weren’t too patient either. The point of eating out was service and convenience. People could instantly leave a negative review if they didn’t receive their order after an expected amount of time and their check right after that. Sharing of a life story was viewed as too much info, not vulnerability.

These days, we pride our hyper-optimization by measuring our steps through our watches, drinking green juices to get our nutrients, and flaunting our time-hacking strategies, rather than our time-sharing ones. We work at standing desks so that the bottom half of our bodies aren’t being too lazy while we make money for other people. We even measure how efficiently we are recovering while we’re sleeping.

But my daughter was wrong. Miss Angie and all these others didn’t “have” more time than us. We all have the same 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 12 months a year. They were choosing to use it differently. They weren’t saving time. They weren’t killing time. They were spending time. Investing it, even.

As we wrapped up and paid our bill, Miss Angie gave the girls a side hug and a “Have a blessed day!”

This was new for us in a dining experience – not just the part where she sent them off with a blessing. In an hour, we’d become confidantes and friends to her; we were way more than customers to transact with at table 12.

Maybe it was because she’d only now in her 70s bought her first home. But the Waffle House was really her living room she invited people into every night. As restaurants promise speedy service, digital reservations, QR menus and ordering systems, even minute-by-minute kiosks, we got something that few restaurants promote these days: Slow service and a candid, vulnerable conversation.

There was no multi-tasking. There was barely single-tasking.

There was no ticking clock of productivity.

No upsell.

There was no key-performance-indicator like how many tables Miss Angie could turn per hour.

None of the things that had dictated my entire two-decade career, 12-hour-a-day work life. None of the things that we exploit about human connection in the tech world showed up at all in Miss Angie’s day.

Just Miss Angie, maybe the food you ordered, and all the time in the world.

This is my morning routine: I wake up. I go to yoga. I eat a high-protein breakfast. I drop my kids off at school. And then, on my way to my neighborhood coffee shop, I talk to David, a man who will never remember a word of our conversation the second after I walk away.

“Namaste!” he’ll say with a little prayer hand bow. It’s a tiny daily cultural appropriation that was once offensive to me, but over time, has become endearing. If not that, it’ll be something he imagines is crowd pleasing, like: “Do you know the most important job in the world? <pause> Being a mother!”

I’ll wave at him and say, “Good morning, David!”

His corny smile will fade. He’ll get sheepish and admit that he doesn’t remember me. He’ll tell me about his accident. It was a bike accident in 1994, causing serious brain damage and permanent memory loss.

David isn’t a towering figure, but he tends to scare people away with his awkward gait and hoarse, loud voice. I’m one of the only people on College Avenue who regularly stops to talk to him. But whenever anyone does, he tells them about the pain that his accident caused. About the time at the hospital, his lost life, his shattered dreams. About how in his memories he’s stuck in 1994, when Bill Clinton was President, and he was 31 years old.

“Were you even born in 1994?” he asks with a smirk. He knows my gray hairs show that my age is well past 30 years old.

On most days, he tells me the same stories he told me the day before. Our own personal Groundhog Day. On others, he tells me about the significance of the year he was born in American history.

I’m always struck that he so often gives me the same greeting, the same Namaste, and tells the same stories in the same ways. I wonder, if I had David’s accident, what would be the handful of greetings, gestures, and stories I would tell everyone, every day for the rest of my life?

After chatting for five to ten minutes, we always end our conversation with the same refrain.

“What’s your name?”

“Sheela.”

“I won’t remember that tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“Maybe one day I’ll remember your voice.”

“It’s okay. I’ll still say ‘hello.’”

He grins, and he waves goodbye.

“See you tomorrow! Same time!”

David will never remember me and gets nothing from our daily conversation, except a few moments of being seen in a world where most of us stare down at our phones, rather than make eye contact as we brush past one another on the street. The phone-staring version was me, for most of my life. That “me” would have been just as irritated by his gruff remarks to passersby and his Namastes.

What do I get out of this every day? A daily conversation that only I remember. Starting this “relationship” anew each morning, knowing I’ll introduce myself again the next day.

David knows he won’t remember me. He doesn’t care about where I went to college, where I work, or the names of my kids. My job title. My career ambitions. Waking up at 3am to mentally scroll through my to-do list. The day that Slack went public and the feeling that I had finally made it…and then facing the internal emptiness that followed.

He lives in each moment of connection, because it’s all he has. I’m just a part of a day that will be scrolled past the minute after I scoot off into the cafe, ready to start my productive day.

I’ll spend time ruminating over whether or not I slighted someone, was polite enough, or had a misunderstanding. I’ll rush to check all the boxes of work, of motherhood, of life, of all of it. And even if I manage to, I still won’t feel like I did it well enough. Something will become an emotional hangnail I’ll chew on until late into the night. When London wakes up, I start messaging my team there, because—why not?—I can’t sleep anyway.

But with David, there’s no pressure, because there’s no score. There’s no transaction here. Nothing to gain or lose. All there is is this moment. This daily human moment of a few words exchanged. The story of the accident that changed his life, and me listening to it. The little awkward cultural appropriation, and me looking past it, even being charmed by it, because David lives in a time well before we used that phrase.

He’ll never remember my name, and I’ll always be repeating my name, every day, for all the days to come. But for a brief period, he can get to know someone and someone will value him, see him, hear him for who he is right now, even if a bulk of his memory is still in 1994.

And he will see and hear me as I am now, today. Just me. Gray roots showing. Not what I do for a living, not the value society places on me, not my politics, not what an algorithm has decided I am.

It may be at once the least substantial and the most pure moment of connection I will have in my day.

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My father emigrated from India to America in 1973 with just eight dollars in his pocket. He had no job, no family, no plan, and no idea what he was getting into. He landed in Chicago in the dead of winter. He had never even owned a coat.

He found a job quickly as an engineer. But he was also mugged one night late on the El train coming home from work. When the thief rifled through his wallet, he was shocked to see how poor my father was. “You’re just as poor as me!” he exclaimed with a lilt in his voice. My dad took the moment of surprise to ask if he could get his Green Card back and a dollar for the train home. The mugger obliged, taking what little else my dad had to his name, before handing back his wallet and walking away.

Welcome to America. Nice doing business with you.

Whenever he told this story, my dad always spoke of the mugger empathetically. They were just two guys, both poor, both trying to make it in a tough city, one born here, one here hoping for more, who for a moment, looked at one another and saw a familiar struggle. They each put their guard down to share a fleeting moment of connection.

When I recount this story to my children, I wonder if an interaction like that could still happen today — if, even in an unsafe moment, connection might come before fear. Whether two people could still recognize themselves in one another, despite the risk of doing so.

We need both safety and connection to survive, thrive, and feel at home. But too often, we're told we must choose — one over the other — with fear standing between the two.

America Through the Looking Glass began as a question: How could something so fundamental to being human — the need to feel safe and be connected to one another — come to feel mutually exclusive?

The question began to gnaw at me not just as a mother who struggled with my own sense of loneliness, but as someone who spent her career marketing products meant to connect the world — and watched them do the opposite. The big promise of the tech industry was that safety and connection could harmoniously coexist — making us safer and happier by growing our social networks. After 20 years working in the industry, it’s become increasingly obvious that we have broken more than we fixed.

Rather than continue to work in technology and build yet-another-product to fix our country’s loneliness problem, I knew I needed to cross the Looking Glass — to find the parts of America where connection still came first, and safety emerged from being known. To learn what we were missing in our controlled, productive… and lonely lives.

So last summer, my husband, Eric, our two young daughters, our dog Tater, and I piled into a camper van and drove through the country to explore the other side of the Looking Glass of America.

We set out on a 30-state road trip across America to understand what connection even means anymore in a country shaped by technology, speed, and ultimately, fear. We went to state fairs, a Headless Chicken festival, and meat auctions as vegetarians. We camped on people’s farms and in Walmart parking lots.

The stories in this newsletter will come from 9,000 miles of driving across this country — and from people who live just down the street. They are inspired by those I have encountered who helped me rethink what connection and community mean these days. Whether while doing the chicken dance on stage in Colorado, identifying bear prints in Virginia, or at a barn dance in Minnesota, their stories have helped me examine how we are living our lives. They’ve made me examine my relationship with time, reciprocity, heritage, and home. I hope that their stories open up something for you too.

All around us, people are connecting with one another in ways that an app, checklist, or AI bot could never replicate. There’s something to be learned from these people.

We find ourselves in one another.