Morning in Manitou Springs, Colorado. My sister and I have a rental cabin located near the base of Pikes Peak. I am sitting on a picnic table outside our cabin, drinking crappy instant coffee, finishing my third chocolate bar. 

My sister brought the chocolate. It’s artisan chocolate. She is asleep in the cabin right now. She’s not going to be happy when she awakes and finds out I’ve eaten all her fancy chocolate. I will undergo one of her famous improvised gender reassignment operations. 

I can see Pikes Peak in the distance. The mountain looks significantly bigger than I remember. About 14,115 feet bigger to be exact. 

We scattered my father’s ashes up there when I was 11. It was a bad day for me. There were a lot of emotions that fateful afternoon. 

The predominant emotion was, of course, altitude sickness. Thanks to the thin air, I could not feel my face, my hands were numb, I was spacey, and I was pretty sure I’d seen Abraham Lincoln and Alexander the Great

in the gift shop. 

Also, there was anger. I was mad. At everyone. At everything. At circumstances. At life. And, most importantly, at Major League Baseball players, who were currently on strike that year. I was just mad all over. And I stayed like that for about 21 years. 

In my defense, I had a lot to be mad about. My dad was in his prime when he shot himself by inserting the barrel into his mouth. He was healthy. He was smart. He was a marathon runner. He ran this mountain every year. 

And then. One day. Bang. Over. 

On the day of his scattering, I was supposed to recite the 23rd Psalm atop the mountain as we upended his ashes. But I never finished…

This is a big trip for me and my sister. We are visiting Pikes Peak to see my dad. And it’s going to be big.

The first thing you should know about my sister Sarah and me is that we like people. It’s just who we are. She and I are both what you’d call extreme “people people.” My father was a people person. And we definitely got his genes.

Like him, we love meeting strangers, talking, laughing, and forming lifelong friendships with random individuals in public who are edging away from us slowly as we continue conversing with the backs of their heads.

It’s what we do. Sarah is even more of a people person than I am. She is outgoing, friendly, and extremely talkative. She has not paused to take a breath since 1994.

My sister takes the art of peopling to the next level and is capable of making friends with anyone, even non-people entities. I know of at least one occasion wherein my sister

made close personal friends with a municipal fire hydrant by trying to feed it dog treats. After the incident, she upgraded her prescription glasses.

Sarah has an extremely amiable personality. I cannot take her to a supermarket without spending several hours waiting for her to finish various spontaneous conversations in the produce department, dairy department, canned vegetable aisle, bulk dried goods department, clearance displays, vitamin section, and women’s restrooms, where I sometimes stand in the bathroom hallway and hear echoes of her conversations drifting past the water fountains.

Most of these random supermarket conversations are centered around extremely womanly issues, and feature no place for a man to insert his thoughts.

Take me. I have been a man for almost as long as I can remember. I do not know how to contribute…