18 Jul 2026 2 min read Roundtrip with MB Lang

The Stacks

The young writer of 1986 has a different voice than the writer of 2006, or of 2026 – and that voice morphed imperceptibly, mostly. This is the mystery of how a heart grows, and it's hiding in The Stacks.

These are The Stacks. The habit of contemplation looks like slowing down to notice what the day was about, and using a pen to capture, on old school paper, what is noticed. Stacks are not built in a day or a year. Photo by MB Lang, Copyright 2026.

People were vacating campus for Christmas break as I wrapped up grades in my office, a scarf around my neck as cloudy cold air wafted through window cracks. Cheryl, the head of housekeeping, stopped in to empty my trash can. I wished her a Merry Christmas. She asked if I would be traveling for break and I said, yes, I was heading out right from campus to drive to Pennsylvania and see my grandchildren. "My car is packed and waiting."

Cheryl said she also had grandchildren. She chuckled. "Yeah, those grandkids. When you have your own kids you think you can't possibly love anyone any more than you love them, and then you get grandchildren and you love them even more than you loved your own children. I don't know how that can be."

I bounced up in my office chair and leaned in her direction. I said, "You know, I noticed that, too, and I've been thinking for a while about how it can be. I think I have an answer."

She looked at me with an amused grin; she clearly had not expected an answer. Her face was saying, "These professor types think too much."

"Here's what I think: We did love our children with all our hearts when we were young moms, Cheryl."

Her head nodded. We both knew this was true. "But, we feel like we love our grandchildren more because our hearts grew. We have bigger hearts now, so when we love the grandkids with all our hearts, that means we love them more!"

She nodded slowly in agreement. Our hearts had grown, and we'd both noticed the evidence of it, we had both experienced it. We had just shared it in a passing Christmas greeting conversation. Ah, phenomenology for the holidays.

This kind of incident is what The Stacks contain.

The Stacks, the actual Stacks, are pictured above, piled by decade. I started this journal project in 1986 and continue it today, forty years later. The volumes were filled mostly at night time, after my children were asleep and I could sit alone in a blue swivel rocker and read my own books, and pray. I recorded events that seemed hugely important and some that were small but bothered me or thrilled me, and I would ask why I found this thing, this word spoken to me, this coincidence, worth my attention. Why this response?

Email subscribers to Roundtrip with MB Lang will receive excerpted curation from these journals in preparation for publication as a teaching memoir. Selected excerpts will also appear in The Stacks for all visitors to Roundtrip. Paid subscribers will receive curated content and will support the publication of MB Lang's work.