Fun-Tuned

October 1, 2026

My friend Todd and I met when we were 18 at a college work-study job. There were students to wrangle, paperwork to process, schedules to organize. Todd did the job right alongside me, but also seemed to hover half a step outside it, watching. He noticed everyone's quirks, but never sneered at them, choosing instead to find it all delightful. Wow, look at that, his manner seemed to say, about everything. It was as though life were continually handing him material.

Fifteen years later, our two families were visiting Monticello when Todd's 2-year-old son Daniel tumbled into the duck pond. Everything froze. Then Todd—who always seems immaculately pressed even when dressed casually—stepped one elegantly trousered leg into the pond up to the knee, plucked Daniel out, and restored him to dry land. He may have felt a flash of annoyance, but it was quickly overtaken by the recognition of his extraordinary good luck: He would now always have been a man who once stood on one leg in a historic pond holding a wet toddler.

Todd isn't amused by everything: Sad things sadden him; outrageous things outrage him. But life's ordinary aggravations—technology behaving mysteriously, bureaucracy behaving normally, people parking grocery carts diagonally across aisles as though establishing naval blockades—elicit a wry Well, isn't THAT amusing. Somehow, before the annoyance has even finished happening, Todd is already living in the story he'll tell about it.

Our families spent some time together this summer. Todd's sons are young adults now, and they're terrific storytellers, too. Nature or nurture? It doesn't matter. A few days with them tuned my amusement radar back to alert, reminding me that we don't have to wait until later to decide what kind of story we're in: We can choose while we're still standing in the pond.

—Debra Ross, publisher

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