Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston

Cam Marston Podcasts
Cam Marston Podcasts
  • 4.9 (17)
  • Personal Journals
  • Updated Weekly

Weekly observations on travel, work, parenting, and life as it goes on around me. Airing Fridays on Alabama Public Radio.

  1. 6d ago

    A Raccoon for Everyone

    The World Cup has taken over America this summer — and it's brought more than just soccer. It's brought raccoons drinking gin. ------ The World Cup sure has been wonderful to watch. I've loved all of it, though I'd be hard pressed to clearly explain offsides. The broadcasters show replays of goals that have been taken back and the commentators say "Oh yes, that's clearly offsides" and I have no idea what they're referring to. It's the equivalent of the infield fly rule in baseball or the tackle eligible receiver in football. It's taken me years to understand these rules, and I have to relearn them each time the season starts. I've really enjoyed the fans that have travelled to the US to support their teams and what they they're enjoying about the US. Many have commented about large portion sizes in the restaurants and the huge variety of food available in the grocery stores. People new to the US and can quickly see why Americans are so large. We become immune to it, but I suspect anyone from abroad can walk down one of our cereal aisles and be bewildered by the many options we have to eat sugar for breakfast. Today online I saw that one of the Norwegian players got off the plane in Norway carrying a stuffed raccoon drinking a bottle of gin. It's something you'd see sold at a strange store on a remote interstate exit and you wonder who would buy that other than a drunk crowd of fraternity boys. Well, apparently, international soccer stars buy them while they're shopping in Dallas. For some kid in Norway, watching their heroes come home from the US, they've got to wonder what goes in the USA that their players come home with stuffed raccoons drinking gin. What happens over there? they must wonder. Who are those people? We'll, we Americans don't buy such things very much. But we do make them for people to bring home and tell their friends "you won't believe what I bought in the US." Now, for those that think that soccer is boring, they're right most of the time. It can be terribly boring. Any game that ends after ninety minutes of play with a score of one to nothing or two to one is going to be a boring game. But when the scoring happens it's as thrilling as any moment in sports. Precise passes punctuated with balls kicked incredibly hard past a goal defended by an above average sized and very athletic guy. And the celebrations in the stadium and video feeds from back home of streets full of people exploding in celebration are also as good as any celebrations in sports, maybe even the best. It's hard not to smile. I'll miss the World Cup when it's over. I've developed a greater appreciation for the game, a big appreciation for the soccer fans who have traveled from across the globe to support their teams, and a deep pride and satisfaction knowing that people from all corners of the world can come to the USA and leave amazed by our grocery stores, portion sizes, and bring home a stuffed, boozing raccoon to remember it all. Good bless America. I'm Cam Marston and I'm just tryin' to keep it real.

  2. Jul 10

    Death of the Accord

    Cam Marston has a confession today — eighteen months ago, he and his wife made a pact to declutter their house for good. Here's why it didn't survive contact with a U-Haul trailer. ----- About eighteen months ago, my wife and I made a deal in a hotel room overlooking the Atlantic. We called it the Fort Lauderdale Accord — not a bucket list of what we wanted before we died, but a list of what we wanted gone. Our aim was to simplify and we agreed on one thing: we had collected too much stuff. So we made a rule. One thing in, two things out. Net loss, every time. We clinked glasses, pinkie truced, and named it like a treaty. For a while, it worked. Drawers emptied. Goodwill runs multiplied. Countertops and the bottoms of drawers reappeared — visible countertops, with nothing on them, visible drawers with nothing in them. We were smug about it. We could do this. Then my mother-in-law passed away, and my wife and her siblings spent two weeks in Raleigh emptying her parent's home. Room by room, drawer by drawer — the work nobody prepares you for. My wife came home in her SUV towing a U-Haul trailer, both packed to the roof. We had to get a storage unit due to so much stuff. And here's the thing — the Accord didn't fail because we lost discipline. It failed because we'd built a rule for the wrong category of object. One thing in, two things out works fine against impulse buys and gadgets and garage-sale finds, because those things are interchangeable. Lamps are lamps. They have little emotion to them. However, a grandfather clock that chimes every half hour and puts my wife back in her bedroom where she could hear the chimes throughout the night all during her childhood? That's not an object competing for shelf space. That's not even really an object. It's a delivery system for a memory, and the rule we wrote was never built to take that into account. That's the part I missed when we pinkie truced our little treaty. We treated "stuff" as one category, when it's really two: things you acquired, and things that acquired meaning long long ago. The first kind has gravitational pull — it accumulates because it's easy, and stays put out of inertia. Not because it matters. The second kind doesn't accumulate at all. It just shows up loaded with emotion and memory, and you'd never get rid of it on a technicality. So we've set a new plan — two years from now, whatever the kids haven't claimed for their own houses and apartments by then goes. But, truth be told, I give that plan poor odds. My wife and my long-term history is to collect, not cull. However, I've stopped thinking we have a discipline problem. It's a category problem. Maybe this stuff means too much, and its outside a rule pinkie truced and clinked over wine glasses. When the last box gets unpacked, we're opening a bottle and clinking glasses again. Not to the Accord — but to what it taught us about ourselves. And a U-Haul trailer. And a grandfather clock that still chimes on the half hour, exactly like it did in her parent's home. I'm Cam Marston, and I'm just tryin' to keep it real.

  3. Jul 3

    A Grief No Words Can Describe

    This week's Keepin' It Real comes from a place of real pain. Cam Marston reflects on the loss of two young men from his community, and a grief he says words can't quite reach. -----             "There are no words" is an expression often used to truly describe deep grief. It's a feeling in your gut, your stomach, that you notice only when the world around you is crumbling and those important to you are experiencing something truly awful. That's the way I feel now. A grief has set in and there are no words to describe this feeling.          Word came early today that two families we know lost their young sons last night in a fire. The news has spread through our community as it often does these days through text messages and quick phone calls. Parents want to know more. The children's friends want to know more. Everyone wants the story, wants to learn what happened, wants desperately to learn it's all untrue but every new text and call confirms it. Parents like me sit quietly, imagining the grief these families must be facing. I knew these boys. There were like our boys. We watched them on the football fields and basketball courts and saw their parents in the stands. My tears won't stop.          My first instinct was to call my son and hear his voice. He's in Tuscaloosa for the summer and I just needed to know he was Ok. I called repeatedly with no answer until finally, I heard my son's voice pick up and…I couldn't speak. Such gratefulness to hear him alive. And that these two deceased sons had parents who would do anything in their power to hear what I just heard from their own sons.          Our community is crashing right now. We've all been gutted with the news. All plans for the holiday weekend have been greatly dampened. There can be no celebration, Fourth of July or otherwise, with his awfulness in the forefront in our minds. Celebration is not a word that will come from our mouths or be a part of our actions for a long time to come.                   Losing a child is losing your future. It's losing stories and memories and cherished moments that were never given a chance. It's forever wondering what that child would have been like as an adult, a parent, an aunt or uncle. Never seeing their joy at their wedding, never seeing their humility and awe while holding their own newborn baby. Never witnessing their pride watching their own children succeed. Their death has robbed each of our lives and our community of two glorious young men and their future and we can only guess at what could have been.          In time we'll talk about the weather again. Or sports. Or our plans for an upcoming vacation. But no time soon. Our community will fall together and hope to find support from one another and, in turn, try to offer some sort of support to those around us that need it. What's happened is wrong. It's not fair. It's devastating. And it has brought all of us to our knees with a deep grief in the pit of our stomach that no words can describe.

  4. Jun 26

    Father's Day Recap

    Cam Marston spent Father's Day at church alone, then had dinner with his own dad — and somewhere in between, figured something out. ----- Father's Day came and went last weekend. It coincided with my wife and my anniversary and the summer solstice – all on the same day. That must mean something. My wife chose to prioritize Father's Day because, well, twenty-nine years is a nice number but it's not all that special, and she wanted me to be celebrated by the kids. I went to church on Father's Day. My wife was going to join me but there was a puppy emergency, and she stayed home on the phone with poison control while I went off to church alone. On Mother's Day, the church is packed. It's a great service and a great celebration with everyone in their finest. It's one of my favorites of the year. But last Sunday, on Father's Day, the church was, well, much less than full. It's as if in anticipation of Mother's Day, the mothers let the family know they will all be going to church and to be ready. On Father's Day? Fathers just kinda go "ehhh. Let's go if it works out." I would have loved to have had my children with me, but I wanted them to want to go, not be made to go. "That's the exact wrong attitude," my wife told me. "You need to tell them what you want." Well, I want them to want to join me. Maybe that's asking too much. I keep a picture of my father near my coffee maker and glance at it most mornings while the coffee is brewing. He's somewhere in his mid-twenties in the picture, standing in someone's kitchen holding a fish he caught and showing it off to the camera. It's a good-sized speckled trout he probably caught somewhere around Dauphin Island over sixty years ago. My dad has been a menace to the speckled trout population his whole life. He can sniff them out, read the water, knows how deep to fish the bait, and come up with fish over and over again. I've been in the boat with him when we were catching fish doing what he told us, surrounded by boats who couldn't catch a thing. We were bringing them in, and they couldn't get a strike. It's my father's special magic. I showed him this picture Sunday night at my house. I invited him for a Father's Day dinner and he came and offered to bring, what else, fish. It was freshly caught snapper, and I've become a big fan of cooking everything in a cast iron skillet in the oven, and we had a heck of a meal. Dad looked at the picture and laughed. No telling how many pictures he's had taken of him holding up a fish. He didn't remember anything from the photo – it was a long time ago, after all. Maybe that's how it works with fathers. We don't demand to be remembered. We just show up, catch the fish, cook the meal, and hope something takes hold in the people we love. And sometimes it does. I'm Cam Marston and I'm just trying to Keep It Real. The puppy's fine, by the way.

  5. Jun 12

    Puppy Patience

    Cam Marston's new puppy has expensive taste — and this week, while the rest of his family's out of town, Cam's discovered his actual job has become full-time appraiser of whatever's currently in her mouth.  ----- Our new puppy got the TV remote control this morning. I noticed it around lunch when I went to see if there were any World Cup games on. I tried the chewed-up remote anyway and found it turned the TV on but not off. And I'm ashamed to say it, but I lost my mind, because that remote was brand new — less than 24 hours old. It replaced the remote she ate last week, which I'd finally gotten around to replacing to the tune of a couple hundred dollars. The remote controls in my house need to live somewhere up high where she can't reach them while she's still in puppy stage, which is to say another couple of years, give or take. So do the shoes, pillows, and anything else of value. She'll eat anything and everything, and she does. There's a small piece of firewood she occasionally chews on, and that's fine — I'm happy with that arrangement. But she very clearly prefers the taste of things that cost money and take effort to replace. It's like she has radar for anything expensive. She knows to leave the cheap and unimportant stuff alone. Old, stinky tennis shoe? Leave it be. New pair? Find it and destroy it. This, of course, brings me to the old line about dogs being man's best friend. Maybe grown dogs are. Puppies sure aren't. My son and I are alone in the house for about twelve days while the other three kids are scattered everywhere and my wife is in Raleigh. When all six of us were here, someone was always nearby, half an eye on the dog. Now I try to work during the day but keep having to stop and check on her, only to find she's figured a way around every defense I've set up and destroyed something new in the time it took me to send one email. I've gone from "don't let her destroy anything" to "evaluate the worth and value of whatever is currently in her mouth." That's become my actual job this week. I hear her trot into a room and I don't even look up — I just calculate. If it's one of her countless chew toys, fine, gnaw away. If it's a wallet or a shaving razor, we have a problem. Yesterday I caught her mid-stride with something dark and rectangular in her mouth, and for half a second my brain ran through every expensive dark rectangle in the house — phone, wallet, glasses, the new remote. Turned out to be an old flip-flop — I've needed a new pair anyway. When my son's home he's chief distraction officer, mostly because an entertained puppy isn't going to chew his guitar or XBox. Twenty minutes of fetch buys me twenty minutes of work. My calendar this week is mostly puppy windows with meetings squeezed in between. Dogs may be man's best friend. Puppies are more like very small, very determined auditors, sent in to find everything you care about and nearly destroy it. To my family scattered everywhere – please come home. I need relief. I'm Cam Marston and I'm just trying to Keep it Real.

  6. Jun 5

    To Goal or Not to Goal

    Most of us have been told that goals are the key to success — write them down, stay focused, never quit. But Cam isn't so sure that's the whole story. ----- I've just completed a goal setting webinar. It was thought provoking and well run. Two things stood out. First – we are halfway through 2026. The webinar host adjusted the what was supposed to be a goal setting workshop with a one-year timeline to half a year to account for the date and though I have a calendar in front of me every day, it still shocked me that this year is half gone. Though factually I know it's early June, hearing him say that the year is half over startled me. Next, I'm not sure I'm a goal setting type of guy. The speaker said that unless a goal is written down it doesn't exist. I'm not so sure that's applicable for me. There are plenty of goals that I replay in my head each day, none of which are written down. They range from trivial – I want my young and tender potted lemon tree to eventually fruit so I'm giving it lots of time and attention – to larger things – I want to celebrate my thirtieth wedding anniversary in an exotic destination somewhere very far from here. I'm not sure writing that down does anything more to cement it - it's already in my head and replaying frequently. But how about this: what happens if my goal is to be more flexible? What happens if my goal is to not get so anchored in my goals that I miss opportunities that are outside my goals? Which brings me to graduation speakers. There seems to be two types – the ones who encourage the graduates to set goals for their lives and dedicate their waking moments to achieving those goals. These speakers are often corporate types who climbed ladders and knocked down walls and stayed up late and studied hard to get where they are. The second type seem to be the ones who encourage the graduates to search for opportunity and be ready to shift and pivot as life presents new paths forward. These are usually the entrepreneurs. They've shifted and pivoted and shucked and jived all the way. They seem less wed to firm, concrete goals. What if Orville and Wilbur had only wanted to create a massive bike company and never pivoted to see if their contraption would fly. What if Christopher Columbus had intended to find India and when his ship made landfall said, "No. This is the wrong place. Let's keep looking." What if Michelangelo had seen the block of marble that became the David and said "I can't use this. It has a hole in it. Find something else." Our world would be dramatically different. So, setting goals is good and powerful stuff. But so is having the will and courage to abandon goals when it appears to be the right thing to do. And to abandon them without remorse. I find when I dig into goals too far, I can't identify when it's time to abandon them and I hold on to them to my detriment. It's happened too many times before. So, at the end of the webinar, I was left with this: to goal or not to goal. That's the question. I'm Cam Marston, just trying to Keep it Real.

  7. May 15

    They Remembered

    Cam Marston made a promise to his kids years ago, certain time would let him off the hook. He was wrong — and this week, he's paying for it, in the best possible way. ----- Many years ago, my wife and I made a commitment to our kids that I thought would probably go in one ear and out the other. It was a commitment that was easy to make because it was so far off that I was sure no one would remember it and they certainly wouldn't enforce it. "When the twins graduate from high school," my wife and I announced one night at dinner, "we'll take a big family trip." The twins were in grade school when we said it. It was a long time ago. They'd certainly forget. Well, I was wrong. The twins graduate Saturday and on Monday, we leave for a big family trip to Greece. For ten years I collected points and miles from hotels, credit cards, and airlines and quickly learned they were more akin to Monopoly money than anything of value. Hotels and airlines will take points, but they love taking cash. We've been squirreling away for this trip for years — which, it turns out, is exactly how long it takes to save for six people in Greece. While the trip begins next week, in many ways it's already started. Last night at dinner my wife went over the itinerary. She's worked hard to put this together, and as she read about the different sights we'd see, some of the kids were online looking at the hotels, the historical sites, even checking the weather for each city. We talked about what clothes we'd need, sleeping arrangements for the six of us, how to handle the jet lag, how much Greek we'd need to know. My contribution to the planning was asking how early I could get my first cup of coffee each day. Like I've learned many times, big trips begin with heightened and excited anticipation which is as much a part of the trip as the journey itself. There's a lot of energy around the house right now. A promise made long ago is about to be kept — assuming the credit card goes through. In August, my wife and I will become empty nesters when the twins leave for college. My oldest two, already away at school, may live at home this summer — which means we could go from a full house of six to just the two of us in a matter of weeks. From a constant thrum of activity and wondering who just came through the front door, to knowing that any sound from the other room is just each other. I've said many times that I'll enjoy the empty nest, but as it looms, I'm less certain. Like so many other big boasts I've made, I may have to walk that one back too. Until then, a summer of memories are on tap: two final high school graduations, a big trip promised long ago, a full house all summer, and a puppy who demands every bit of attention we can spare. I made that promise years ago, certain they'd forget. They didn't forget. Apparently kids are better at remembering the promises that cost you money than the ones that don't. I'm Cam Marston, and I'm Keepin' It Real — from Greece, starting Monday.

  8. May 8

    Witness To Your Life

    Most of us have heard the phrase "they really knew me" — but rarely stop to consider what that truly costs us when it's gone. ----- What Does It Mean to Have a Witness to Your Life? Strange question, I know. But it surfaced at my mother-in-law's funeral this past Monday in Raleigh, and I haven't been able to shake it. A childhood friend of my wife's pulled her aside. "I'm sorry," she said. "Your mother was a witness to your life. Losing her is hard." I had never heard that expression before. And the weight of it hit me somewhere I wasn't prepared for. If we're lucky, we have two witnesses to our life — our parents. They see everything. More than our spouse. More than our closest friends. More, even, than our siblings. A witness to your life doesn't just observe — they hold it all. Every dream you floated and forgot. Every version of you that didn't survive into adulthood. Every embarrassing, earnest, unguarded moment. They're a repository of who you were before you decided who you wanted to be. And then, one day, they're gone — and they take all of that with them. Maybe that's where much of the grief comes from. Not just the loss of a person, but the loss of a record. A living memory that held you before you knew yourself. Most of us spend considerable energy managing how we're perceived. We curate ourselves — what we say, what we wear, what we let slip about our lives. We've been doing it since middle school and most of us never really stop. But the witnesses to our lives are immune to all of it. They knew us before the performance began. They can see behind the façade, recognize the architecture underneath, and — if they're good ones — they cherish what they find there. They're the ones who say I knew you when. There are so few of them. And being with them feels like taking off armor you forgot you were wearing. I am the witness to my children's lives. I knew them before they knew themselves. And I believe a good witness guides without directing. Observes without interfering. Because here's the hard truth about helicopter parents, snowplow parents, drone parents — the ones who manage every moment of their children's lives: they're not witnesses. They're directors. And I've been that, more than once. I've crossed the line from watching to controlling. The difference matters. When controlling parents die, their children don't always grieve. They exhale. A burden has lifted. That's a devastating legacy to leave. A witness to your life can't be hired or requested or manufactured. It accumulates. Quietly, over decades, mostly in the background — someone taking note, savoring what they see, asking nothing in return. You rarely think about what they mean to you while they're there. You only understand it fully when they're gone. I'm Cam Marston, and that's Keepin' It Real.

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Weekly observations on travel, work, parenting, and life as it goes on around me. Airing Fridays on Alabama Public Radio.

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