Last week, Jake and I had an hour to kill between school and a doctor’s appointment. We met by the metro, a fall breeze gently rustling through drifts of yellow leaves on the sidewalk, and he asked me what pumpkin spice was.

What??

Pumpkin spice started in Seattle, like all good things start in Seattle, with a latte back in 2003. Maybe it’s a little oversaturated now with “pumpkin spice flavored pumpkin seeds” (!!!), but when the sun starts hanging low in the sky, pumpkin spice is warm and perfect. We also got a piece of lemon loaf, because Jake had never had that either. He liked them both (although I think he’d still rather just have a cinnamon roll).

Then we walked to the library and found a quiet table on the second floor, next to a wall of biographies. About people who thought they would matter, who changed the world for a while, enough to have a book written about them. There were hundreds of names, a long line of lives and amazing feats, alphabetized and covered in plastic. I recognized a few, but most I didn’t. And here I sit, with my son and a piece of lemon loaf from Starbucks, thinking the goal of a life is to be one of them.

And suddenly, it all makes sense. I will never be one of them. But I have a 16 year old son who isn’t embarrassed to go to Starbucks and sit at the library with his Mom. I help him with physics and he tells me about new music, and I think, none of the people in these books could have had a life any more wonderful than this. Even if I achieved something great, this moment would not be in the book, and yet this moment is the best one, the one that will keep me warm for the rest of my life.

The world of lemon loafs and Starbucks and homework after school is the reason that I’m here. Not the plastic-wrapped book or the account of what I was that the world will soon forget, but the humble small efforts of each small day, meaningful at the time, to someone. The world will warp our meaning and our memories anyway, so maybe I will just live like this one is the one that changes the world.