Many homes
Sledgehammer (1 of 3)
Posted to LinkedIn on 2026-09-16. The text below is the post as published.
When I was 15 years old, I took a sledgehammer to my parents’ driveway and reduced the slab to rubble. The driveway did me no wrong. Indeed, it gave me a gift even as I pulverized it to help prepare my childhood home for sale. I think about more recent homes, where I lived and where I worked, as I look back on my first.
South Florida. Spring, 1985. The only home that I remembered knowing was going to be taken away. I was going to be taken away.
My feet and hands had grown beyond a boy’s. My heart and mind were outpacing my ability to keep up. It was both surprising and gratifying how easily the demolition came. The roots of our giant ficus tree had already caused the driveway to buckle and break in places. I worked from the head start that mother nature had given me.
At 15 — and for many years after — I believed that suffering, my suffering, had to mean something. The driveway concrete yielded time and again to my ministrations. The sweat from my limbs glistened with fury and with grief. The recurring shock of the hammer pulsing against pavement kept me in my body the whole way through.
I knew the gift of my parents’ sanction of space and time and sympathy as I beset both their driveway and my grief. Mom and Dad taught me love, and they threw me into chaos.
Less than a year later we settled in North Florida, in a modest home that my mother named Dayspring. She chose “dayspring” from Luke 1:78: “Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring [ἀνατολή, anatole] from on high hath visited us … to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
The move that had infuriated me gave her new life, like daylight reborn. So at 16 I wrote her a poem, “Anatole”; it didn’t heal my heartbreak exactly, but it set that anguish aside. I have had many homes. I have remained in a single home. I inhabit the sledgehammer that crushed and the sunrise that broke.
[This is the first of a series of 3 LinkedIn posts on homes.]
Many homes
- 1 · Sledgehammer (this post)
- 2 · My supervisors
- 3 · Still inside