For most of my life I had the wrong idea about what makes a man rich.
Two weeks ago, my wife asked me what I wanted for my 65th birthday. I told her the same thing I told her last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.
Dinner.
Not a trip. Not a watch. Not anything I could put on a shelf and admire for six months before forgetting about it. I wanted a table full of people I love in the Purple Parrot Room at Crescent City Grill.
My birthday isn’t until October 2, but I won’t be home. I’ll be working in Rome that day, headed toward the Amalfi Coast, hosting a group of Yonderlust guests. So, Jill put the dinner together a couple of nights before I left for Europe.
There were 14 of us around the table.
At some point during dinner, I stopped paying attention to whatever conversation was going on and started looking around the room. A sense of overwhelming gratitude hit me. And then this little voice started in on me: You need to stand up and tell these people what they mean to you.
I ignored it.
That seemed like the sensible thing to do.
I’m fine standing in front of a thousand people and giving a speech. Put me in a ballroom, hand me a microphone, and I can go for an hour. But standing up in front of 13 people I love and telling them, one at a time, what they mean to me? That felt a whole lot harder.
So I sat there. But the voice kept after me for 30 or 45 minutes.
Finally, I gave in.
My daughter was sitting immediately to my left, so I started with her. Then I moved to her husband, and from there I went around the table, one person at a time, saying a little something about each of them and what they had meant in my life. No notes. No plan. I just said whatever came to mind. Some of it was funny. Some of it wasn’t. A couple of things probably came out wrong. That’s usually how things go when they’re real.
And then, after working my way all the way around the table, I came to the person sitting on my right. My wife. My best friend for almost 40 years.
My grandfather used to say, “You can judge a man’s wealth not by the size of his pocketbook, but by the depth and breadth of his friendships.”
He also said, “A rich man has his first dollar. A true wealthy man has his first friend.”
I heard those lines all my life. Though I’m not sure I understood either one until recently.
For a lot of years, I thought birthdays were about gifts. And for a lot of my adult life, I chased the material things pretty hard. Money. Stuff. More stuff. Better stuff. The next thing— which was still just stuff.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’ve turned into some monk who owns three possessions and sleeps on a mat. I like a nice hotel. I like a good steak. I own restaurants. I’m not anti-comfort.
But I do know this: the things I value most now can’t be bought. That took me a while. Probably longer than it should have.
I’ve got friends in my life I’ve known so long I can’t remember meeting them. There’s something about those early friendships that is almost impossible to duplicate later.
Those people knew you before you became anything.
Before the job title. Before the business. Before anyone outside your hometown had a clue who you were. Before you learned how to polish your story or make yourself sound more impressive than you really are.
They knew the original version.
And somehow, if you’re lucky, they still like you.
I can go months without seeing some of those people. Years, even. Then we sit down and in five minutes we’re right back where we left off.
That is a rare thing.
It also gets harder to make those kinds of friendships as you get older. There’s no playground anymore. Nobody walks over at recess and says, “Hey, you want to be friends?” Adult friendships take effort. Schedules get crowded. Families grow. Work takes over. People move away. Life gets noisy.
Still, some of the best friendships in my life came later.
Restaurants have brought people into my life. So has recovery. Church has. Business has. Travel certainly has.
I’m writing this on a plane headed to Athens, Greece, where I’ll host 25 Americans on the first of five Yonderlust tours this fall. We’ll start in Greece, then I’ll host another group through Rome, Amalfi, and Naples, followed by three groups in Tuscany.
A few people will stay with me for more than one leg, which I like. You get to know people differently when you travel with them. You eat together, get lost together, laugh together, wait on buses together, and occasionally get on each other’s nerves. That’s travel.
One of the great unexpected blessings of Yonderlust is how many of the people who started out as guests have become friends. Hundreds of people have traveled with us over the years. We’ve shared meals, missed turns, bad weather, great wine, and a lot of laughs. Somewhere along the way, a lot of those relationships stopped being host and guest and just became friendship.
I never saw that coming.
I started Yonderlust because I love travel, food, and showing people the places I love. I figured we would take some good trips, eat some good meals, and hopefully give people experiences they would remember.
I didn’t know I was going to make so many friends.
There’s a week off between southern Italy and Tuscany, which I’m not crazy about. One day between groups is enough for me. But we couldn’t get the villa on the week we needed, and the villa won.
I’ll spend some of that time in London working on my next book, “A Tuscan Travel Journal.” I’ll stop in Milan for a couple of nights to see friends (yep, I’m blessed to have them over here, too), then head south and finish the fall season in Tuscany.
At 65, I’ve been around long enough to accumulate a lot of stuff. I’ve also been around long enough to learn that almost none of it deserves the importance I once gave it.
I’ve had some good years, some hard ones, made plenty of mistakes, learned a few things, and been blessed more than I deserve.
But none of that was what I was looking at the other night.
I was looking at a table. My daughter. My son-in-law. Friends from different chapters of my life. My wife sitting beside me.
And I was thinking about my grandfather.
A rich man has his first dollar. A truly wealthy man has his first friend. I’m not sure where that puts me on anybody else’s scorecard. But sitting at that table, I felt like the richest man in the world.
Onward.
Purple Parrot Pumpkin Cheesecake
2 pounds cream cheese, room temperature
1 Brown sugar
Pinch salt
5 eggs
4 egg yolks
3 /4 cup Pumpkin Puree
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp Pumpkin Spice
Preheat the oven to 275 degrees
Place softened cream cheese in large mixing bowl and beat using paddle attachment on medium speed until VERY smooth. Scrape sides and beat again to ensure there are no lumps.
Add brown sugar and mix well. Add in eggs and yolks a few at a time, allowing them to incorporate well before adding more.
Place the mixer on slow speed and add pumpkin puree, vanilla extract, and pumpkin spice. As soon as the pumpkin is incorporated, stop mixing
Pour the batter into a cheesecake crust (recipe listed below) and bake for 1-1 1 /2 hours. The cheesecake should jiggle slightly when tapped. Remove and let cool on a wire rack. Refrigerate overnight before serving.
To cut cheesecake, run a thin knife under hot water before cutting each slice.
Cheesecake Crust
1 1 /2 cups graham cracker crumbs
3 /4 cup
1 /2 cup sugar
Combine crumbs and sugar and mix by hand Add butter in stages, mixing well before each addition.
Evenly distribute the crust in a nine-inch spring form pan, pressing it firmly on the bottom of the pan, and building crust up two inches on the sides of the pan.
Pour in the cheesecake batter and bake for 1-1 1 /2 hours. The cheesecakes should jiggle slightly when tapped.
Remove and cool refrigerate overnight before serving.
To cut, run a thin knife under hot water before cutting each slice.
