My brother visited over Thanksgiving. He drove, sorry, he sat in a self-driving Tesla and never touched the steering wheel from Utica, New York, to Bartlesville. He brought apples from a local orchard. They were perfectly ripe—crisp, sweet, juicy. It made me think that maybe our lives should be considered this way. Ripe means ready to harvest and eat, fully developed, fully flavored.

I’ve lived in an era of unsurpassed innovation. From moon landings to microchips, from radios to algorithms, we have measured our success by how much we can do and how quickly we can do it. The assumption has always been that progress moves in one direction. Only later does the more difficult question surface: what, exactly, did it cost us to get here?

Wendell Berry points out that there is rarely an effort to calculate the net result of that progress. In other words, what does all this advancement cost us?

“After several generations of technological progress… we have become a people who can’t think about anything important. How far down in the natural order do we have to go to find creatures who raise their young as indifferently as industrial humans now do? Even the English sparrows do not let loose into the streets young sparrows who have no notion of their identity or their adult responsibilities. When else in history would you find ‘educated’ people who know more about sports than about the history of their country, or uneducated people who do not know the stories of their families and communities?”
—Wendell Berry, Feminism, the Body, and the Machine

I’ve been fortunate to live in this community for most of my life, experiencing it in all its ripeness—even though I never worked for Phillips 66. As a result, I was an outsider of sorts. I never quite felt fully at one with the cultural zeitgeist of Bartlesville. And yet, even as a non–“Phillips guy,” there were moments that rooted me deeply here.

Eating at Murphy’s, then climbing the hill near the airport with my siblings.

The train whistle echoing through the tunnel at Kiddie Park—my children, their children, and I connected by that same sound.

Moments of minor rebellion: draping the statue at the Community Center with a toga (not me) and teleporting the Western Sizzlin’ cow to the high school lawn my senior year… (also not me). But I know who done it.

A tent revival. Brother A.C. Crisman, mid-sermon, leaning toward my father and asking, “Terrel, are you resting your eyes?” Dad replied without opening them: “No. I’m sleeping.”

OK Mozart concerts at Woolaroc. Phillips 66er games. Micro-midget races at the Phillips 66 Riverside Speedway, sitting next to Boots Adams.

Downtown parades—thrown candy, Santa Claus, and President Eisenhower.

Landmarks: Radar Hill. Doty’s Dumps. Gravity Hill. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower. Bruce Goff’s Sooner Park Play Tower. Garage bands jamming in the Band Shell on a Saturday afternoon.

Some moments are uniquely mundane. In 1976, the Col-Hi Wildcat basketball team was running onto the court. I was about the fifth guy off the bench. My buddies in the stands were taking bets on who would run through the paper hoop decorated with our Wildcat mascot. Everyone bet it would be one of the stars. It was me—because I came out of the locker room first. I got shoved through the hoop as the stands erupted. One of my finest moments in sports.

Price Little League diamonds when I was pitching. Nothing ever felt better in my hand than a new baseball fresh out of the box—not roughed up with mud like a major-league ball, but bright white cowhide with clean red stitching.

I read bedtime stories to my son beside his window, looking west across Silver Lake Road on Friday nights. The treetops along the river were lit by the football stadium lights. Sometimes we simply listened to the Bruin band, its low rumble drifting through the timber so naturally it felt like they were playing in our front yard. Father and son, reading together, listening to a free concert across the river.

My hometown is forever a part of my fully developed self. My father passed away just across the breezeway that connects our houses, where my mother and sister still live—on land my dad and I once purchased from the estate of L. E. Phillips’s son. Phillips, of course, was one of the founders of Phillips 66. Perhaps I was never quite the outsider I believed myself to be.

To know my hometown—with its victories and tragedies, its names and places, its heroes and villains, its landmarks and symbols—is to understand a part of America, and to deepen one’s commitment to it. Roots grow this way, pressing deeper into the fertile soil of memory, anchoring us to places that hold history and secure our place in the ongoing story.

So how do you measure what matters?

I feel those who have gone before us lean down and pray over us. We are tied together—shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart—by shared experience, by things that can’t be quantified, only felt in the tender ripeness of a shared life.