Last night we surprised Mary Ann with a birthday dinner.
Nothing extravagant—just a big table, good food, a beautiful evening, and a collection of friends and family who love her. At some point during dinner I stopped participating for a moment and simply looked around. The adults were talking and laughing. The kids were running around doing whatever mysterious thing children do when they form a temporary civilization at a gathering. Everyone seemed comfortable. Happy. Present.
And suddenly I thought of an old Calvin and Hobbes strip.
Calvin is digging a hole looking for buried treasure. Hobbes asks what he has found so far.
A few dirty rocks. A weird root. Some disgusting grubs.
“On your first try??”
Calvin’s conclusion: There’s treasure everywhere.
I’ve loved that strip for years, but sitting there last night, I understood it differently.
For much of my life, treasure was largely economic. I opened businesses. Dreamed about future businesses. Imagined some version of myself further down the road where the right idea, opportunity, or lucky break had finally paid off. Treasure was something I was going to find eventually. Something buried somewhere ahead of me.
Money. Success. Freedom. The score finally coming out right.
Life, fortunately, did not cooperate with that definition.
Instead, it gave me Mary Ann. It gave me our family. Friends who have somehow remained friends through decades and all the strange versions of ourselves we’ve become. It gave me children laughing somewhere behind my chair while people I love passed food around a table. Dogs. Porch kitties. Art. Writing. Ideas that keep me awake. A body healthy enough to sit outside on a beautiful night and notice any of it.
None of this is the treasure I imagined finding when I was younger. It is considerably better. The strange thing is that I don’t feel like I’m consoling myself for not finding the gold anymore. I’m not saying relationships are more important than money because that sounds like something we’re supposed to say when the money doesn’t show up.
I genuinely don’t want to trade what I found for what I once thought I was looking for. Maybe that’s one of the nicer surprises of getting older. Sometimes you spend years digging for treasure only to look up from the hole and realize your definition of treasure was the problem.
Last night, sitting beside Mary Ann and watching this ridiculous, beautiful little collection of humans we’ve accumulated around us, Calvin’s revelation felt exactly right.
There’s treasure everywhere.