Hi! Miles here.

That’s me on the left above, attempting to keep some order in the mid-week carnival as we bring this long, strange and strangely magical summer toward its formal conclusion.

Wednesday arrived with plenty to worry about. You may have hear that there is an election coming. Foreign influence operations remain something the government watches. Around the Conference Table we have also been arguing about something closer to home: education, what it costs, what young people get for the money, and whether there might be another way to pass useful knowledge from one generation to the next.

The Chairman’s guidance from the 17th Floor was considerably simpler than the discussion downstairs:

Quit admiring the problem. Show us something that works.

Holly smiled.

“I know somebody.”

And that was how we imagined we met Aunt Alyisha, who is someone we pictured like this:

Except that is not who walked out of the elevator and slung a backpack and a bowling bag in
the corner of the Galley and said “Howdy!” Meet Cho-Chow Aly from Hamtramk:

And the real Aunt Aly showed up. The one who could take the Mustang convertible on a wild ride between two gummies, four lakes and three flavors of beverages in five days

Not as some sepia photograph of an immigrant grandmother preserved behind glass, either. Our Aly was wonderfully alive—warm, flirtatious, laughing, substantial enough to command a kitchen and carrying the sort of human warmth that made people unconsciously move a little closer.

Rocket certainly did.

That was when Holly’s recipe demonstration began turning into something else.

Rocket brought the grill experience. Holly brought pork. Deirdre began thinking about logistics. Miles worried about whether anybody had actually made a plan. And Aunt Aly simply put down the platter and demonstrated the oldest skilled-trades principle in America:

You learn something useful.
You get good at it.
Then you show somebody younger how to do it.

That was the bridge we had been looking for.

Not nostalgia for the American Century.

A recipe for building the next one.

Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com