Yesterday didn’t look like a “big” day from the outside.
No fireworks. No drone show videos. No glossy Instagram shot standing in front of anything iconic. Just a cramped apartment, a mall, a community center, some subpar burritos, a mediocre country band…and one of the best days we’ve had in a very long time.
When I rewind from this morning, what I see is a stack of little wins.
The first win was the decision point: Santa Anita versus the kids.
On paper, Santa Anita sounded like a blast. Cheap hot dogs, horses, a little low-stakes gambling and a chance to feel like I’m out “living life” again. The other option was a quieter, less flashy one: time with the girls, some mall chaos, and whatever energy Traci had left after all that.
We chose the kids.
The day started building from there. A visit from Kelli and Nikki after a wedding dress fitting. Conversation about the event to come. The simple normal of being together. Then we leveled up to mall mode when Nikki needed to still find the right shoes for the event, and we all saddled up for the Cerritos Mall. The entire mall was packed full of people shopping retail like it was 1996 again. Big crowds and tons of which shoe is best debates, the million little micro-decisions that used to feel annoying and now feel like a privilege.
Traci pushed herself. She didn’t float through the day as a passenger; she chose it. By the time we got back to Mission HQ, the tank was already low. She crashed out for a nap as the kids departed, because that’s how this works now: everything good has a cost. You don’t get a “normal-ish” day for free.
Then came La Mirada.
We loaded up again and headed to the community center for America’s 250th anniversary celebration. On the flyer: food, music, and a drone show lighting up the sky. In reality: a whole town’s worth of folding chairs, big trees, kids running around, and that quietly electric feeling of people just existing together.
I crushed a below-average burrito from a food stand. The country cover band was…fine. Not great. Not terrible. Just there, twanging away in the background of our life.
But here’s the thing: we were there.
We weren’t in the ICU with no clock on the wall. We weren’t in a tiny apartment counting pills and timing alarms. We were outside, under a flag and a fading sky, in a crowd. Traci in her chair, me beside her, both of us a little stunned to find ourselves in the middle of “normal” again.
And yeah, we left before the big moment.
About fifteen minutes before the drones were supposed to launch, I watched her start to fade. The day had caught up with her – kids, mall, nap, community chaos – and you could see the crash coming. So we did the most on-brand thing for us: we bailed early.
We did everything…except the thing we technically went there for.
In another version of my life, that’s an L. That’s the night you complain about the food, mock the band, and grumble about missing the main event. In this version, in this season, it was a giant W.
Because the win wasn’t the drone show.
The win was Traci having enough strength and enough hope to say “yes” to the day in the first place. The win was watching her push herself to see the kids, to wander a mall, to sit in a crowd and listen to a band that will never be on anyone’s playlist. The win was leaving early not in defeat, but in wisdom: protecting today so there’s something left for tomorrow.
And tomorrow, for us, was Disneyland.
As I write this, she’s sleeping off yesterday – paying the price for all that “living” – and we’re getting ready for a short Disney sampler. One ride (the new Mandalorian and Grogu scene on Smugglers Run). One snack. One shop. One photo. That’s it. Low expectations, high gratitude.
I’m even hoping to find some kind of July 4th Disney outfit for our “Happy 250th Birthday, America” visit next month. We celebrated the 250th in a little city park last night, and we’ll celebrate it again under fireworks and a castle later. Same theme, different arenas.
The ICU felt timeless because there were no clocks. Days melted together, and it was easy to lose track of what mattered beyond surviving. Now, the way I tell time is in tiny wins.
Did she make it to the couch? Win. Did she stay up until 9:00 once? Win. Did she walk from the couch to the bed after weeks of not doing that? Huge win. Did we get out of the apartment, even if it meant a recovery day after? Win, win, win.
So no, we didn’t see the drones. There’s no photo of synchronized lights over La Mirada to go with this story. What I do have is Traci in a pink hat in her chair, a crowd shot selfie from the back of the pack, and a memory of us sitting under a flag and a sunset, feeling almost like regular people at a city event.
And today, I’ll have one more memory: us in a galaxy far, far away, flying the Millennium Falcon with the Mandalorian and Grogu, probably arguing over snacks and hunting for a ridiculous “Happy 250th, America” Disney shirt.
The older I get, the more I’m convinced that the gift isn’t the big moment you went for, the fireworks or the drone show or the perfect day you pictured.
The gift is getting to go at all.
Paul Ellis 
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