We had plans and they hit a wall. That’s tough for a 14 year-old celebrating her birthday.

We rescheduled but that left us with today and it was bleak. There had been plans, there had been high anticipation and now…I had to substitute something for my daughter.

We thought a brunch with French toast would help. As we drove over to our favorite 50s diner, I remembered something.

“This is the last Saturday of the month. My friend used to play music with at the famer’s market. I always tried to go see her play.

“She loves playing music so much that she has three or four jobs so she can play music. It’s that important to her. She knows for sure that it’s the most important thing.

My kid was listening, but she didn’t have much to add. I turned into the parking lot.

I have a great number of things I want to do in life. I am also right at this moment trying to advise my kid on the cusp of high school how to choose a life path. We have been trying to talk about the things one could do.

It’s not such a straight path. I certainly did not follow a brochure to find the career I have found.

I am sure that is true for a lot of people. How did all the circumstances line up to arrive at the now?

I admire my musician friend’s clarity. A rare few artists are so committed to their artistic efforts that they place it at primary place. An even fewer number make enough money from their art to sustain themselves.

The rest of us shuffle our to-do’s and priorities to keep both food and a roof. We grownups have to scrape together a plan from whatever is left lying around., I tried the doors to see if any were unlocked. Then I mustered up the courage to walk through the open ones.

It didn’t always work out. Just like the night before a birthday party, there was anticipation and sleep lost. And some things slipped out of my grasp.

Me and my daughter were having breakfast and coming to terms with her latest disappointment. That might be one of the most grownup things a person could do.

Walking is supposed to one of the first key skills humans learn. My mom tells me it took forever for me to learn to walk. My three older brothers kept knocking me down. But I did eventually master it.

Those brothers became more useful to me in that other human skill: reading and writing. I got some help with the letters and that became one of my favorite things to do.

I know writing is something that it seems like almost everyone can do, but making something to share is a little different. I’m trying to get better and write at a higher level. I am glad, dear reader, that you are reading what I’m writing.

To be precise, though, people have not always been able to write. Prehistorically, things weren’t written down. Even after writing was invented, humans didn’t write everything down. The stories that were captured and preserved until the present day are like a time machine.

What were people like back then? How did they see the world and what was important to them?

I have a set of journals…no, diaries… from when I was a teenager. Who was this person who wrote so faithfully? It’s a dim and faded record of who I once was. A frozen record of what I used to be.

My writing pinned me to a card like a specimen bug—a piece of my history.

I just finished reading a book from 1298: The Travels of Marco Polo

That’s a piece of history from a long time ago. Still—I thought I would know what people in the thirteen hundreds thought was important. This book is so famous, I figured it would be full of the sort of stories I would expect from the middle ages.

I was wrong. It surprised me to find what he thought was important. He was far more practical that I would have expected.

What was even more interesting is how the readers of this book loved it. I am impressed with the readers of 700 years ago. This book was passed on from reader to reader, translated so often that there aren’t any original copies left.

All of Europe was very interested in what was over the horizon. Not just the crazy stories, but the how and the what. We have the record in this book.

And then we have the record—the history—of what came after. Columbus read the story of the spices and had to get some ships over there.

Marco Polo had the adventure, and he needed someone to help him write it down. He found a writing partner in prison. Rustichello de Pisa is the one that wrote it all down and made this book that captured so many people’s attention. And kept it.