Some Things Don’t Need an Upgrade

This is the last thing I’m going to say about Joy’s traveling shoes. On September 10, 2026, at exactly 6:34 a.m. Central Time, Joy’s shoes were shredded into insulation.

I know that because that is the exact moment the AirTag stopped working. After traveling from St. Louis to Kansas City, Louisville, Miami, Cocoa Beach, Harrisburg, and finally Oceanside, New York, the little pink glitter shoes—and apparently the AirTag tucked inside one of them—met the industrial shredder.

End of story.

So today I want to talk about something completely different: the pace of change.

I don’t particularly like change. And lately it seems as though everything has to become newer, faster, smarter, and more complicated every twelve months (or sooner). There’s a new iPhone every year. The latest one, the iPhone 18, has enough battery life to watch something like 36 hours of movies on a single charge. Why?

Seriously. Why?

Let’s say watching movies is your full-time occupation. You wake up and watch movies for eighteen straight hours. At some point, presumably, you have to sleep. Charge the phone then. Apparently these things can get a full charge in less than an hour.

Problem solved.

Last year I drove a rental GMC Yukon that seemed slightly more intelligent than I am. The seat vibrated if I was driving a bit faster than the cars in front of me. It had night vision. It had hands-free driving capabilities.

Hands-free driving? Hell to the no.

I want to hold the steering wheel. I want to decide where the car goes. I don’t need my seat giving me a massage every time the truck in front of me slows down to the speed limit.

Maybe I’m becoming an old man. I’m okay with that. And maybe that’s one of the reasons I love watching Joy so much.

Joy does not need the newest version of anything. Give her a stack of coloring pages and some crayons. Or, better yet, a blank piece of paper and something to write with. She loves bike rides. Puzzles. Dolls. Hide-and-seek. Hugs. Kisses.

And every morning, without fail, she tickles my feet. There is no software update required. No new model coming next September that promises to tickle my feet 37 percent faster.

Just Joy.

I know change is necessary. Some of it is wonderful. Some of it makes our lives easier, safer, and healthier. I’m certainly not suggesting we all throw our phones into the same shredder that ate Joy’s shoes.

But I do wonder sometimes if we’ve confused change with progress. If something can be made faster, we make it faster. If it can be automated, we automate it. If it can have a screen attached to it, somebody will attach a screen to it. (Our thermostat has a screen that tells me the temperature in Celsius. I don’t know how to change it to Fahrenheit. And I can’t do the conversion in my head, but I’ve discovered that 23 degrees C feels about right for the summer.)

Meanwhile, Joy is sitting at the table with a coloring page. (And I’m right next to her. She insists that I put my phone on the charger during coloring time. I love that.)

Or she’s hiding somewhere in the house and giggling so loudly that finding her requires absolutely no detective work.

Maybe she has it right. The world can keep upgrading itself every year.

Some of the best things in my life don’t need an upgrade at all.

The AirTag Is Dying, but the Shoes Are Still Traveling

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the unexpected travels of Joy’s pink, glittery high-tops. For anyone who missed the first installment: I returned the shoes to Amazon at Kohl’s because Joy had tripped in them while running for the bus and done a spectacular face-plant. Unfortunately, I forgot one small detail. I had left an AirTag inside one of the shoes.

So instead of disappearing into the mysterious universe of Amazon returns, Joy’s shoes became trackable. And apparently they have places to be.

When I last wrote, the shoes had traveled from St. Louis to a warehouse near Kansas City, then to Louisville, Kentucky, then south through Georgia and Florida, eventually landing in Miami. I assumed Miami might be the end of the line. It was not.

For about a week, the shoes stayed in a building on NW 70th Street in Miami. Most of the time, Find My showed them sitting on or near a loading dock. I began imagining an enormous pallet of Amazon returns sitting there: somebody’s broken coffeemaker, three pairs of leggings that didn’t fit, a shower curtain in the wrong shade of blue, an inflatable dinosaur costume, and Joy’s sparkly pink size 13 Little Kid high-tops.

Every once in a while, the dot moved. For a while, the shoes appeared to be in a narrow walkway between two buildings. Then they were next door. Then back on the loading dock. Then they sat on that loading dock for several more days.

And then I checked one day and suddenly they were moving. Not just moving around the warehouse. Moving. The shoes were apparently inside a semitruck heading north through Florida. A pair of $14 children’s tennis shoes that had already traveled more than a thousand miles were now taking a road trip.

Near Boca Raton. Then farther north. Eventually, the dot stopped at a Flying J near Cocoa Beach. At this point I was beginning to feel less like someone tracking a forgotten AirTag and more like the parent of a college kid checking Life360.

Okay. They stopped for the night. Good.

Two days later, I checked again.

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Another truck stop. Next door was the Country Pride Restaurant. I like to imagine Joy’s shoes sitting quietly in the truck while their driver went inside for chicken-fried steak.

And today? They are in Oceanside, New York, inside a building on New Street. Naturally, I looked up the businesses in the building. There appear to be several: PHSE USA, Compassionate Care Pet Aquamation, and J & M Stucco.

So now I have even more questions.

What exactly are Joy’s shoes doing in a building occupied by a biotech company, a pet aquamation business, and a stucco contractor? I have no idea. Honestly, I have understood less about this journey with every passing mile.

These are not expensive shoes. They cost $14. They are used, pink, glittery, and size 13 Little Kid. And somehow they have now traveled roughly 3,000 miles: O’Fallon, Missouri, near Kansas City, Louisville, Georgia, Miami, up the Florida coast, Pennsylvania, and now Long Island, New York.

For fourteen-dollar shoes.

This raises a question I had never given much thought to before: What exactly happens to all the stuff we return to Amazon?

I suppose I imagined that somebody looked at the shoes, decided whether they could be resold, and put them in a box somewhere. I did not imagine them touring the eastern United States.

At this point, I desperately want to know the economics of this. Surely the gasoline used to move these shoes around the country is worth more than the shoes. The loading docks are worth more than the shoes. The warehouse space is worth more than the shoes. The portion of the truck they occupy may be worth more than the shoes.

And yet they keep moving.

I’m also becoming increasingly curious about their ultimate destination. Are they being sent to a liquidation warehouse? A reseller? A donation center? Another Amazon facility? Are they about to cross the Atlantic? At this point, nothing would surprise me. I could open Find My next Tuesday and discover that Joy’s shoes are in Belgium.

There is, however, now a deadline to this little adventure. My AirTag is giving me a low-battery warning. Google tells me I have about another week before that little dot disappears for good.

So, shoes, you have seven days.

I’m still hoping for the ending I wanted two weeks ago. I want that dot eventually to stop moving and turn up somewhere that makes sense—a house, a school, a playground. Maybe I’ll see them sitting in the same place for several days and imagine another little girl putting on Joy’s old glittery high-tops and heading off to kindergarten.

That would make this ridiculous 3,000-mile journey feel worthwhile.

Of course, it is also entirely possible that I am no longer tracking the shoes at all. Maybe someone found the AirTag. Maybe the shoes are already gone. Maybe I’m following an AirTag that has been tossed into a pallet of miscellaneous merchandise and is now enjoying the greatest adventure of its electronic life.

I have no way of knowing. But I do know this: I paid $14 for a pair of tennis shoes, Joy wore them for a while, she face-planted while running for the bus, I returned them—and those shoes have now seen considerably more of America than most shoes ever will.

Come on, shoes. You’ve got seven days. Find a kid.

Things That Go Bye-Bye

Our toilet had been acting strangely for a while. It would flush, but painfully slowly. Even with absolutely nothing in the bowl, the water would rise nearly to the rim, linger there, and then very slowly recede.

So today I finally had a plumber come over. He plunged. He snaked. He did whatever mysterious things plumbers do while the homeowner stands nearby trying to learn their secrets. Eventually, he had to remove the entire toilet from the floor. And there it was: a nearly full, large tube of Colgate toothpaste lodged just above the pipe.

Colgate.

Now, I don’t particularly like Colgate toothpaste either. But I deal with that by buying a different brand. I do not flush it down the toilet. Joy, apparently, has developed a different philosophy of waste management: If it fits in the bowl, it can go bye-bye.

Toothpaste? Bye-bye. Toothbrush? Potentially bye-bye. Dad’s car keys? Let’s not even think about it.

Unfortunately, a fairly large amount of money also went bye-bye today when I paid the plumber. Still, I suppose I should be grateful that it wasn’t my iPhone.

We’ve had another unusual Joy-related journey going on lately—although this one does not involve plumbing. A few weeks ago, I bought Joy a pair of high-top tennis shoes. They looked great on her, and she wore them to summer school. Then one morning she was running for the bus, tripped over the shoes, and face-planted. And when I say face-planted, I mean she did it thoroughly.

She had cuts and scrapes on her eyebrow, eyelid, forehead, lip, and cheek, plus a scraped knee and elbow. That was enough for me. The high-tops were going back. So I took them to the Amazon return counter at Kohl’s, handed over the shoes, got my receipt, and went home.

There was just one problem: I had forgotten to remove the AirTag from Joy’s right shoe. (Yes, I modify Joy’s shoes so that they can accommodate an AirTag.)

Which means I have now become far more emotionally invested in the Amazon returns process than any human being should be. Every so often I open Find My and check on Joy’s traveling tennis shoe. For several days, it was hanging out in Grove Valley, Missouri. Then it moved to an Amazon warehouse in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, where it apparently enjoyed another little vacation.

Today, Joy’s shoe is on the move again. According to the AirTag, 7 minutes ago it was traveling south on Highway 75 in Georgia, just north of Ashburn. I don’t know where it’s going. I don’t know whether Amazon knows where it’s going. But I know exactly where it is.

Somewhere in Georgia, a returned high-top tennis shoe containing my AirTag is having a considerably more adventurous summer than I am. I’ve decided not to interfere. I want to see how far it gets. Maybe eventually it will end up in an Amazon liquidation center. Maybe somebody will buy it. Maybe six months from now I’ll look at my phone and discover that Joy’s right shoe has moved to Idaho. At this point, I’m along for the ride.

So today’s Joy report involves two objects making unexpected journeys: one tube of Colgate attempted to travel through the sewer system, and one high-top tennis shoe is currently touring the southeastern United States. The toothpaste didn’t get very far. The shoe seems considerably more determined.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this is Joy, who remains blissfully unconcerned about either one. As far as she’s concerned, things disappear. You put toothpaste in the toilet: bye-bye. Dad takes your shoes to Kohl’s: bye-bye. The only person foolish enough to keep tracking where everything goes is Dad. And after today’s plumbing bill, Dad is keeping a much closer eye on his iPhone.

“DAAAD! Chips!”

I work in the quiet room at the library most days. Some days I’m away from home for ten hours, and by the end of the day, I miss Joy and everyone else at home.

When I finally walk through the door, dinner is usually either still on the stove or already on the table. We eat, talk about the day, and then—often before I’ve had much time to settle in—I hear it.

“DAAAD! Chips!”

“Chips” does not simply mean chips. “Chips” means: Dad, get your shoes on. We are going to Dollar Tree.

This has become one of our evening routines. We go often enough that I suspect the Dollar Tree staff may call the police if we fail to show up by 9 p.m.

We hop on my three-wheel passenger trike. Joy puts on her pink helmet and buckles herself into the bench seat behind me. I flip on the headlight and tail lights. Dollar Tree is about a half mile away. We get there in about 5 minutes.

When we walk in, Joy gets the cart. I follow.

First stop: the chip aisle, naturally. Usually Pringles, despite the fact that we currently have at least six cans of Pringles in the pantry. Then health and beauty, where we may need Band-Aids whether anyone is injured or not. Then toys: Play-Doh, cheap dolls, assorted plastic objects that will be underfoot by tomorrow morning.

Then food: tuna packets, Red Vines, ketchup, off-brand drinks, and whatever else catches Joy’s eye.

Finally, we make our way through the household section for facial tissues, paper towels, disinfectant wipes, and other things that allow me to pretend this is actually a practical shopping trip.

One of my favorite things is simply watching Joy shop. She pushes the cart with purpose, perhaps a bit too fast for safety, examines the merchandise, makes decisions, and occasionally stops at one of those little price scanners to check what something costs.

The answer is usually $1.25. But Pringles are $2.50. She takes the whole process very seriously.

Which brings us to money.

I use a credit card for almost everything. I rarely carry cash, and Joy almost never sees me paying with actual bills.

But today Deb sold a few things on Facebook Marketplace, so for once we had a little stack of cash sitting on a side table in the living room.

Until Joy found it. She seemed to know instinctively that she had discovered something important.

Within moments, she was making it rain like she’d wandered into a strip club. Mom got some. Aunt Ashley got some. Fives and twenties were being handed out with remarkable generosity.

But of course Joy kept most of it. She stood there clutching a fistful of bills and waving them around like she had just won the lottery.

And I kept thinking: How does she even know what this is?

I’ve never really shown her money. She has play money for her ice cream stand, but it’s smaller, different colors, and looks nothing like actual U.S. currency.

Yet there she was, a seven-year-old, holding a wad of cash and looking exactly like someone who understood that life had suddenly taken a very favorable turn.

People sometimes joke that kids think money grows on trees.

Joy apparently has an even better system: Money simply appears on the living room table.

And when it does, you grab as much as you can, give a little to the people you love, and start planning your next trip to Dollar Tree.

Which, I assume, will be tomorrow.

“DAAAD! Chips!”

TikTok Star

Joy has had a pretty great summer.

For the past few weeks, her aunt Ashley has been in town and spending a lot of time at our house. And when your aunt happens to be a TikTok star with about 40,000 followers, there is a fairly good chance you are eventually going to find yourself appearing in a few videos.

Joy has now entered the TikTok universe.

And apparently, people like her.

Her appearances in Ashley’s videos have been getting plenty of likes and comments, so perhaps we have a future TikTok star on our hands. Joy certainly seems comfortable with the medium. Give her some music, a snack, and an audience, and she is ready for production.

Her specialties so far include dancing to Billy Idol and eating snacks with her aunt while the camera rolls.

The results are hilarious.

There is something especially funny about watching Joy realize that a camera is pointed at her. She doesn’t suddenly become shy or self-conscious. If anything, she becomes more Joy. There is dancing. There are expressions. There is serious attention paid to whatever snack happens to be involved. And Ashley, who knows exactly how to capture the moment, keeps the whole thing rolling.

I’m including a couple of screenshots from their recent collaborations as well as the movie poster for Joy’s new movie.

I have no idea whether Joy understands that thousands of people may be watching these little moments. I suspect she mostly understands that Aunt Ashley is here, the music is playing, snacks are available, and everyone seems to be having a good time.

Which, come to think of it, may be the healthiest possible approach to social media.

So stay tuned.

Billy Idol. Snacks. Joy. Aunt Ashley (@ashleypayton9 on TikTok).

The ingredients for TikTok fame are apparently all in place.

Keeping Up with Joy

Joy is hula-hooping now, and she is very good at it.

At first, she didn’t quite get the hang of it. The hoop would go around her waist maybe one or two times, then drop to the ground. But she simply would not give up. She watched her sister doing it and decided, in the determined way Joy does, I want to do what Sister can do. And so she kept trying.

Now she’s got it. Those little hips really go.

Watching her learn has been a reminder of how much can be accomplished when someone refuses to be discouraged. Joy did not stop to wonder whether she had natural talent. She did not whine about how hard it was. She just kept at it until the thing that looked impossible (to me) started to look easy.

So I’m inspired. I may have to get an adult-size hoop and see whether I can keep up.

In the meantime, I’ve taken up running. I started in October, and my times are getting better. I recently ran a 5K in 34.5 minutes, which felt like a real achievement for me. Part of the reason I’ve stuck with running is that it’s fun. Part of it is that it’s great exercise. And part of it is pure necessity.

Joy likes to take off from the front yard and sprint down the street with no concern whatsoever for cars, dogs, or my increasingly urgent insistence that she stop. She just laughs and keeps running. So someone in this family needs to be able to run an eleven-minute mile.

At the moment, that someone is me. And more than once I have had to catch her and carry her home.

Between Joy hula-hooping and Joy bolting down the street, she has become both my inspiration and my conditioning program. She is a reminder that hard work and determination can pay off.

A seven-year-old can become an expert hula-hooper. And a sixty-four-year-old can train to run faster than a seven-year-old.

Joy sees something she wants to do, and she does it.

I see Joy in the distance, and I run to catch her.

It’s beautiful, really. One of us is running straight toward joy. The other is running straight toward Joy before she reaches the corner. For now, that seems to amount to the same thing.

Home. Sick.

Joy has been sick for over a week—home from school, bundled in blankets, moving slowly through her days. I thought I was immune. I had the flu shot. The COVID shot. Daily vitamin C. I figured I was covered.

For eight days, I’ve wiped her nose, cleaned up her vomit, spiked her orange juice with liquid acetaminophen, and let her kiss me anyway. And I felt fine.

Today, I’m not so fine.

But that’s life with a first-grader.

Even when she was clearly feeling awful, she still wanted to do alphabet puzzles the moment she woke up. We do them every morning. It’s our routine. If I make a mistake—like putting the letter V in the A slot—Joy simply picks it up, places it where it belongs, and moves on. She never scolds me. She never comments. She understands that mistakes happen.

I love that about her.

After puzzles, we play with the volleyball. Then it’s Cheerios and orange juice, though her appetite hasn’t been quite the same.

When we lie down for nap, she tickles my toes for five whole minutes. She does most of the giggling.

Tomorrow, she’ll likely go back to school. I’ll probably crawl back into bed at 8:22, right after she gets on the bus, grateful for the extra sleep.

But I’ll carry the week with me.

The puzzles and the volleyball. The Cheerios and orange juice. The way she fixes my mistakes without a word, as if kindness is the most natural thing in the world. The sound of her laughter when she tickles my toes, joyful and unrestrained.

These days don’t last forever. Neither does the sickness.

What remains is the knowing—that even in the small, uncomfortable stretches of life, there is so much love. Enough to fill a week at home. Enough to carry us both forward.

A Letter from a Mom

A while back I received a letter from a reader.

Hello,

This is a strange thing to write in this comment box, but I have a daughter with Down syndrome, and she’s named after your daughter Joy, even though I’ve never met her or you. Let me explain.

My other daughter was in Joy’s class at Meadows when I was pregnant and we got the news that she would be born with Down syndrome.

It was an emotional time for me, and one day I noticed Joy (I didn’t know her name yet) in the pickup line and overheard the teacher say to your wife what a great day she’d had that day and has every day.

I was overcome with emotion hearing that; it was so overwhelming for me. And then later there was a picture of Joy and my daughter on the class app. I asked my daughter about her, and she told me her name was Joy, and I immediately started crying. I was not yet at the point where I felt joy, and I found it incredible that you guys named her Joy.

I resolved at that moment that my daughter’s middle name would be Joy and that I would manifest a feeling of Joy in my heart for my soon-to-be baby even though that’s not what I was feeling at that moment. I was so scared of the unknown.

Fast-forward to today, and our little L___ Joy (now 20 months) is the joy of everyone she meets and the little joy of our family!! It’s hard to think back to those early days after the diagnosis. I think about my fear and sadness with shame. But seeing your daughter Joy, without even meeting her, brought Joy to my heart and helped me through that time.

I ran into my daughter’s preschool teacher recently and through our conversation I ended up telling her the story and she shared your blog. I just spent the last hour reading it. It’s so lovely. I’m so moved by what I read that I thought I’d take a leap and send you this note. I loved reading the stories of Joy and I can’t wait for my little L___ Joy to experience all of the things I’m reading about.