1) Who is the most famous native of Columbus, Ohio? Is it still James Thurber? He surely has less currency these days. Jack Nicklaus? Niche, and fading. Josh Radnor, the kids might answer. There are a host of people who may have been born in Columbus but aren't especially associated with the place, like Prescott Bush and Lil’ Bow Wow. My hometown awaits its icon.

Research into this question led me to Ralph Waldo Tyler, who deserves to be better known.

2) The first house I lived in is blurred out on Google Streetview. Why? It's a totally unassuming, if charming, place; the resident (who can be found, if you do some digging) seems fairly unexceptional. A mystery to be solved.

3) Everywhere we went with Mom. The Statehouse. German Village. The Lazarus department store, with its little half-escalator under the sign “Up to Basement.” Northland Mall, and the shock of discovering they had put a roof over what had been a grassy courtyard. Lawson's. The model train store. Baskin Robbins’ French vanilla. The campus at Ohio State. The old COSI on Broad Street. Movies at the Ohio Theater. For a treat, McDonald’s, where I never wanted cheese on my Filet o’ Fish and always had to wait. The dinosaur on the roof of the Sinclair gas station on High Street.

4) Glass bottles of milk on the back step. That doesn’t feel possible.

5) At Mike’s Barber Shop in Clintonville, Mike asked me if I combed my hair with an eggbeater. My grandmother’s friends used to run their fingers through my curls and comment how much they wished they had my hair. As far as I was concerned at the time, they could have had it. I’d kill for that hair now.

6) Columbus, Delaware (Kilbourne, I was corrected by a proper Delawarean), Gambier, Exeter, Gambier, Columbus, Gambier, Claremont, Delaware (Kilbourne), Columbus, Chicago, Delaware/Kilbourne, Columbus, New York, Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn.

7) I have always been fascinated by maps. World maps. Maps of the township. Amusement park maps. Maps showing “Here Be Monsters.” Maps of obscure countries you've never heard of. The maps in the front of fantasy novels (or the map in Ta-Nehesi Coates’s excellent and underrated memoir The Beautiful Struggle, which places it squarely in the genre of the epic journey). When I went to Isla Holbox the first time, my journal was called Mi Mapa de Holbox, and included a treasure map of the island.

8) Equally, I have always been fascinated by - obsessed with - amusement parks. I think it is because they have always felt like little worlds to explore and discover. Until we figure out anti-gravity, a roller coaster is the closest thing there is to flying.

9) And baseball, while we’re at it. At the end of my second-grade year at Brown Elementary School, my classmates were excited by the idea of starting little league. I didn't really know what little league was. I joined the team and traveled to distant lands like Ostrander and Radnor, where Kilbourne usually lost. At bat we imitated Joe Morgan’s flapping chicken wing. They wouldn't let us imitate Pete Rose’s airborne, headfirst slides. I was never very good. I did not let that stop me.

10) I don’t remember ten. At some point in my childhood I said I wanted a party, and Mom arranged one for me, and I was embarrassed by the attention and never wanted a birthday party again.

11) Columbus Academy was a whole other realm. I have mixed feelings about it now. It was the right choice for me, bored enough at Brown Elementary that there might have been trouble ahead. And yet, a place like CA can warp your sense of the world. My college admissions colleague Avis once said the challenge of deciding between public and private school was which set of horrible things to expose your child to. Somehow we sorted ourselves out, though, or maybe the assholes did the sorting for those of us they decided didn't belong: Jeff, Andy, Andrew, Kevin, Dave, Matt, others.

12) John Humes was the first person other than my parents who paid me for my time and labor. Making hay under Cervantes’ shining sun is miserable work, or it was when the state of the art was stacking bales on a rocking wagon and then unloading them in a barn, in the evening, when all I wanted to do was go home and eat dinner and listen to the Indians broadcast from 3WE on my GE Superradio. I admired the way John insisted on doing things in his careful way, even as it kept us there late finishing the job. He paid me more fairly than anyone ever has.

13) The Rev. John Witherspoon (and the Leather Apron). Tom/Petruchio. Claggart. Kolenkhov. Abram (Squaring the Circle). Algernon.

14) One summer afternoon, Dad sat me down to ask why I didn’t want to play football. As if it was Martin’s Ferry.

15) I failed my first driving test. The examiner from the Highway Patrol seemed to approach the role by seeking to rattle the prospective licensee. “You gotta get your head screwed on straight!” he informed me as I braked too early for a stop sign.

16) The first job that came with taxes and a W2 was at a distribution center for a chain of department stores called Gold Circle. I was a Material Heavy Handler and I worked 5:30 am to 2:00 in the afternoon. I spent the first two days unloading trucks full of lawn furniture; I spent the first two nights dreaming about skid-loaders bringing me more lawn furniture. Toilet paper begins to be heavy after the first railcar. It made college seem a reasonable choice.

17) Pat Clements, Kelly Moody, and Lance Coon. Whatever I may have said about Columbus Academy above, they taught me the way of the book.

18) My first presidential vote was for George McGovern, in the 1984 Democratic primary. He had already withdrawn from the race but was still on the ballot. I voted for him to make up for having voted for Richard Nixon in a mock election in the first grade.

19) We drove through Gambier when I was a kid. I don't remember where we were coming from. It was all leafy; the swimming pool still had its greenhouse-glass roof; the buildings were all castles. I really only have memories of memories from that brief tour, but somehow the decision was made then and there. I’d have done better farther away from home - going to England proved that; moving to California proved that - but then I wouldn't have been at Kenyon.

20) Despite the round number, twenty is not important. It falls between voting and drinking, unnoticed, unbothered, happy to be in the corner watching.

21) I studied abroad at Exeter. Around the time I left England to return home, I thought, “I know how to do this the next time.”

22) So many things in my life began with eight months of working for Tom Stamp.

23) I went to California for the first time in my life, for a job interview at Pomona College. I brought with me a middle-American image of Los Angeles. My 6 am flight from Columbus was canceled, and since it was well before I could reach anyone on the west coast, I did the best I could to get there. I had to change planes in Minneapolis and landed at LAX two hours after the interview was going to start and still two hours from campus. It was smoggy and the passengers in the shuttle talked with the driver about freeways. We passed a school with a baseball field and billboards. I believe my resourcefulness in dealing with travel interruptions helped me get the job. A month later I drove west with everything I owned in the back of my pickup truck.

24) Looking out my kitchen window over palm trees at snow-capped mountains. In-N-Out. Discovering a new coffee joint called Starbucks. Vin Scully. KCRW and a fantastic evening show called “Snap!” with Deirdre O’Donoghue. Walking to work after a rain and smelling the lemon trees in along the way. Earthquakes. Budget Gourmet for dinner. Driving, everywhere: the 10, the 101, the Santa Monica, Foothill Boulevard, Arrow Highway, up to Mount Baldy, down to San Diego. Up Coldwater Canyon from the Valley, across Mulholland, and back down to where it deposits you on Beverly Drive, and you know you’ve arrived in paradise.

25) Two weeks before my twenty-fifth birthday, I called my friend Stasha and said the words “I’m gay” out loud for the first time in my life. It still feels, as Paul Monette wrote, like a narrow escape.

26) As for that: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

27) Jason. Your first love is special, maybe the more when it comes late.

28) Amtrak got me to Boston late for my grad school interview at Harvard. They gave me some materials to read and sent me off to lunch while they rearranged schedules. Among the materials was a statement of the Education School’s philosophy, which included opposition to tracking. When I returned for my interview, I asked the department chair why, if Harvard opposed tracking, they didn’t set a standard of admissibility and then just hold a lottery. He was nonplussed by my inquiry.

Later, at Chicago, I told the story in a gathering at my advisor George’s house and he shouted, “Chris makes another friend!”

29) I've written about George before. Pretty much everything I have to say about my teaching career is there. But one of the disappointments of my abbreviated teaching career is that it prevented him from becoming a mentor. He really had an understanding of the goals and tools of education that was extraordinary, if my future colleagues were any indication. And he demanded your best.

30) I was sitting at a place called The Coffee Table, at the corner of High Street and Buttles. An actor from the touring production of Angels in America was across the room, reading Emma. We flirted, and then I went over and struck up a conversation.

31) The first time I saw New York City I was driving from Choate, where I was teaching summer school after college, to visit a classmate who lived in Princeton. I drove past Co-op City, which I imagined to be an enormous and terrifying housing project, and then under Washington Heights and across the George Washington Bridge. Washington Heights equally looked like a slum from the vantage point of the Cross Bronx Expressway. (Later, I was talking with Kenyon’s dean of admissions, John Anderson, and we agreed that the difference between Los Angeles and New York is that the worst neighborhood in LA is full of charming bungalows and palm trees, and the best neighborhood in NYC looks like it’s on the verge of despair.)

32) The second time I visited was at the end of that summer, when I stayed for three or four days with a different classmate, Steve, who had taken a job as an editorial assistant at St. Martin's Press. He lived in an apartment in Cobble Hill where a bed and a dresser filled his room completely. We ate Tandoori bluefish in the East Village, met up with his future wife Anne on the Upper West Side, ate ludicrously large sandwiches from the Carnegie Deli. Left to my own devices, I wandered to the West Village and down Christopher Street, besotted.

33) There’s a before and after in your life, isn’t there? Well, a lot of befores and afters. For me, a number at once: Before and after meeting Pink. Before and after moving to New York. Before and after my brief and unhappy career as a schoolteacher.

34) I love teaching, I really do. I hate schools. I hate that school in particular. It was a mass-production approach to education that is fundamentally at odds with humanity. I knew it on Day 1 - before Day 1, really - and suffered through a year. I feel bad for the kids who had to suffer through it with me.

35) When I was in first grade, I calculated how old I would be in the year 2000. It was impossibly far off; 35 was impossibly old.

36) New York, though: A graduate school professor said to me, as I described my plans to him, “It’s like London in the 17th Century - if you have the opportunity to live in New York City at the end of the 20th Century, and you don’t take it, you're a fool.” That sounds, even as I write it, the worst sort of provincialism. It’s an enormous world, and the more you live in it, the more you travel through it, the more you realize you will only ever see the tiniest part, and know even less. Still, I think Stuart was right.

37) That course, by the way, was 17th Century Documentary Prose, and I certainly didn't choose it for the course title. I chose it because someone told me that if I had the chance to take a course from Stuart Sherman, and I didn’t take it, I would be a fool. A classmate shook his head when I told him I was taking a “reading-intensive” course. At Chicago, that meant something.

It was the most compelling ten weeks of study imaginable. I was way over my head; everybody else in the seminar - there were seven or eight of us - was finishing up their PhD work and heading off to write a thesis on Defoe or Pepys or whomever. I was kind of their pet, the Education student who knew next to nothing. We had fun; we wondered at how every development in the evolution of the internet had been predicted by the evolution of the newspaper. Stuart was as fantastic as advertised, and may have gone easy on me with the grading.

38) A lesson for you kids out there: Over your head is exactly where you want to be in your career. It’s how you learn how to swim.

39) That is only metaphorically true. At Lake Michigan on a wavy day, we thought we would swim out to the second sandbar. Halfway out I realized that if it turned out I couldn’t stand there, I wasn’t going to make it back. Panic set in. Kathy saved my life, quite literally.

40) We went to Peter Luger’s. Kathy was there, along with Will, John and Justine, Liisa, Sean and Rosemarie. Pink of course. Jeanette had happened to be in town the day before. It was everything I wanted it to be. You should get one like that.

41) I missed this earlier, although I hadn’t especially intended this list to be in order. But: The greatest gift my father ever gave me was to take me aside and tell me how important his aunts and uncles had been to him, when he was growing up. He had aunts and uncles close to him, in a way I never really did. He told me I should find a way to be that person for my nieces and nephews. It took a while; I was wrapped up in my life in New York and a theater company and a job that would consume as many hours as I offered it. But I had heard him. He had a way of letting you know when he was telling you something that really mattered.

I don't know anything about anything, but I was utterly unmoored by my emotions when my mom woke me with the words, “Uncle Chris.” That feeling might make one believe one doesn't know anything about anything.

42) Also a little out of order: At the end of a drive from New York to California, I found myself in the redwoods. Which also might make one believe one doesn’t know anything about anything.

43) There was a bank. In New York City, when one concludes that teaching middle school is the wrong path and no matter how far you've gone down it, you should turn around, and one turns to temping, sooner or later you’re going to end up at a bank. It was never the plan, and despite it never being the plan I stuck with it far too long. On the other hand, I try to tell myself that as far as I know, I have lived the best possible version of my life, so maybe it wasn’t a bad choice.

I learned a lot working there. Sometimes the work was interesting, and sometimes I found that I had aptitude for surprising things, and sometimes those two aspects of the job coincided. I made friends. I ate some good lunches and a horrifying number of terrible ones, sitting at a desk. The pay kept a theater company afloat. All that said, there’s not a single thing I produced in twenty years of working there, off and on, that I care about.

Everything else I have to say is here.

44) About that theater company: It’s really hard anytime you’re in the middle of the work to keep a sense of what you’re doing and why, let alone whether any of it matters. It’s harder when the work is swept away at the end of the day, writing on the sand. I think it was better than banking, though.

I write enough about making theater; I'm not going to add a lot today.

45) Although: The greatest gift Pink ever gave me was the opportunity to work with a young man named Chance.

46) And, “How many times have I told you to stop prostituting in the house,” may be the greatest line ever written for the stage.

47) One time, we drove back from Ohio and met signs in eastern Pennsylvania or western New Jersey informing us about the river crossings and roadways that were closed because the World Trade Center had fallen on them. One time, I drove back from Ohio and met signs in eastern Pennsylvania or western New Jersey informing me about river crossings that were closed because of Hurricane Sandy.

48) I wasn’t there, and I still feel guilty about that.

49) As the plane descended toward Mexico City I was anxious. The taxi took us from the airport to the Hotel Gillow. I looked out the window and thought, “It’s Los Angeles, but with street life.” Cómo Nueva York, inmediatamente me encantó, although it took a bit longer to learn how to say “inmediatamente” correctly. Another city that kicked open the doors of my heart.

50) I don't remember 50 either. Except that in the run-up to it, I felt I would finally be able to own being a grown up.

51) I’m not sure that happened.

52) Captain Jack Sparrow showed up just as we were sitting down for Christmas dinner. We were just holding him until we could find his owners or take him to a shelter. There is debate today as to whether Pink or I cracked first, and whether it took three days or only one.

If you are paying attention, they teach you what a lifespan looks like. But nobody warned me about that.

53) All the Kings Men, and then Go Down, Moses. Lawrence of Arabia. Graceland. Or maybe Flying Cowboys. Master Harold ... and the Boys, or Wit. Or The Merchant of Venice, despite (or because of) its flaws, but Shakespeare feels like cheating. Eugene Onegin. Concerto for Two Pianos in E-flat major (Mozart’s cheating too). The Burghers of Calais. “What Work Is.”

54) New York is a city of immigrants. (One obvious cliche among sixty thoughts isn’t bad, I guess.) In Washington Heights, straight off the turnip truck, I sought out the barbershop with the most English-sounding name that I could find, walked in the door, and watched as every barber in the shop burst into full voice along with the Merengue song that came on the radio. They did a fantastic job on my thinning but still unruly hair. Two or three doors down Jin sold the best produce around; across Fort Washington Avenue, our butcher kept an eye on his German-Jewish parents, who had a pigeon for a pet. At Kappy’s video store on 181st, Kappy was a refugee from the early ’70s, with a Shirley Maclaine section and another titled “Kooky and Nutty.”

55) New York is a city of immigrants. It was less obvious in Park Slope and Red Hook. But between Sunset Park and Bay Ridge is Leif Erickson Park, honoring the Norwegian mariners and longshoremen who worked along the docks. Today Sunset is mostly Mexican-Americans and Chinese-Americans. When our state senator decided to begin caucusing with the Republicans, we stood outside an event where he was speaking and shouted, “Jesse, escucha! Estámos en la lucha!” I looked around me and saw, with wonder, neighbors who were fully American and fully Mexican at the same time.

56) It is about damn time we had a mayor who understands that experience.

57) Sirens. Hearing my neighbor carted off to Langone Hospital, unable to catch his breath, and then return home because he wasn't sick enough to be admitted. A refrigerated truck in front of the Islamic funeral home across Fourth Avenue. Empty streets on the Upper East Side as I went to see my doctor, with heart palpitations that kept me awake at night: maybe stress, maybe an undiagnosed case. Driving across the George Washington Bridge to go hiking at Bear Mountain with Jack, feeling sudden, intense relief to be out of my apartment for a day. People asked why I wasn’t getting out of the city. It felt important to be here.

58) Nothing in life prepares you for discovering your chosen career didn’t choose you, for having to make payroll every two weeks, for marriage, for divorce, for the moment you walk out of the doctor’s office after a troubling diagnosis and realize “I’m going to die someday - probably not today, hopefully not soon - but someday.” For waking up in a hotel room at five in the morning with unbearable grief that isn’t connected to any thought or reason and sobbing for two hours straight because your father has died. I still don’t know anything about anything.

59) But I think I’m finally starting to get it right. Maybe I’ll know how to do it the next time.

60) Not nearly enough people are saying, “You don’t look it.”