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David was twenty-four, sitting on the floor of the Kingston airport, playing his thumb piano. He had just been expelled from a church work camp in Haiti, with the rest of the summer suddenly open in front of him. So, he did what he always does. He played.

A man stopped to listen and asked about the instrument. The two of them talked, and it turned out the man ran Jamaica’s board of tourism. He had a large house in Kingston, and he offered David a room there, free of charge, for the rest of the summer. David spent the next several weeks traveling the length of the island as his guest.

That is where his curiosity took him. To understand how he got there, you have to go back a few months, to an orientation room in Port-au-Prince.

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The three kinds

When I asked David how he keeps his curiosity alive at 80, he didn’t reach for a memory. He looked it up. He typed the word into his phone, read me the definition out loud, and started sorting himself into the categories.

There are three kinds, he told me. Diversive curiosity, the pull toward anything new. Epistemic curiosity, the drive to know one subject all the way down. And empathetic curiosity, the wish to understand what another person is feeling and thinking. He claimed all three. He owned the first one with a confession: he has been called snoopy, and once asked a woman at a dinner so many questions that she told him she felt interviewed, so he backed off.

The one that stuck out is the third. For David, empathetic curiosity is how he gets close to people, and getting close to people is how he gets close to himself. “By dancing with other people,” he said, “it helps me get in touch with the dance inside of me.”

My own curiosity runs on a different question. Where David reaches for what a person is feeling, I reach for how a thing works, the mechanism under the surface. Same engine, different target.

Careful and diligent

He found something in the etymology that stopped him. The word curiosity comes from the Latin for careful, or diligent. He asked me why care would sit at the root of curiosity. The link is attention. A curious person looks at what most people walk past. We all run on shortcuts, the mental rules that get us through a day without examining everything. Curiosity is the diligence to set the shortcut down and look again, to ask the question the room has agreed not to ask.

The animal test

David is precise about why he guards this. He told me, with no apology, about a visit to his doctor. Everything checked out, and then the doctor said he wanted to run one more test, given David’s age. A test for dementia.

David did not care for the word. He decided, on the spot, that whatever else went in his file, that word would stay out of it. The test was simple: name as many animals as you can in one minute. Go. Zebra, horse, dog, cat, moose, giraffe, lion, rat, on and on. The threshold was sixteen. He got eighteen, barely clearing it. The next year he practiced and got twenty.

Then he delivered the punchline he had been setting up the whole time. The real reason he stays curious, he said, is so nobody finds out he’s demented. He let it land, the way the two women who each lived to 103 told him never to lose the joke. The joke carried the truth underneath it: he keeps his curiosity in shape the way other people keep a muscle in shape, refusing to let it go slack.

Port-au-Prince, 1970

Which brings us back to Haiti.

In 1970, David joined a volunteer work camp building a public health dispensary in the hills above Port-au-Prince. Two groups sponsored it: the Church of Christ and the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker organization. He had spent three years in Africa studying the instruments connected to religious ceremonies, and he had come to Haiti to do the same with the music of voodoo.

At orientation, they told him the rule. While he was on the island, he would not be permitted to attend voodoo ceremonies. David raised his hand. He said that studying those ceremonies was the entire reason he had come, and that the ban looked to him like religious discrimination. They held the line. Attend a ceremony, they told him, and you are out of the program.

He understood the choice in front of him. He had watched conservative missionary groups across Haiti work to replace what people remembered of their own music, art, and religion. He did the pick-and-shovel labor on the dispensary for a few months. And he went to the ceremonies anyway. They expelled him.

The door in Kingston

The trait that got him thrown out of the program is the trait that got him the summer. He would not stop following the thing he was curious about. Following it cost him his place in the camp. Following it also walked him into the Kingston airport with a thumb piano and out of it with a host, a house, and an island to explore.

This is the pattern worth naming for anyone building a next chapter after 50. Curiosity works like a practice. It can be built, kept in shape, and allowed to go slack. Like any practice, it asks something of you. Sometimes it asks you to be the one person in the room who says the rule is wrong. Sometimes it costs you the safe spot. David has been paying that price and collecting that return for sixty years, and at 80 he is still doing it, phone in hand, sorting himself into categories, naming animals so the word never lands on his chart.

The thumb piano has opened a lot of doors in this series. The one in Kingston may be the clearest. He had lost the program. He sat down and played. The next door opened.

Where we go next

One story has been waiting since the beginning: the woman David met in Tanzania in 1965, a nurse who studied in Ireland and came home speaking Swahili with an Irish accent. We meet again soon. I think it’s time.

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David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He holds a thumb piano, a long memory, and, by his doctor’s count, at least twenty animals’ worth of curiosity. He is, by his own account, an improviser.

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

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David Thiermann has interviewed two people who lived to 103.

Both were women. He spoke with them on separate days, in separate conversations, with no chance for comparison. He asked each the same question: can you give me some advice about whatever?

Both gave him the same answer.

He has been thinking about that for years. Two people who outlasted nearly everyone they knew, who had watched the world change from a distance most of us will never reach, and they both pointed to the same thing. Humor. Specifically: don’t lose it. The phrasing itself is a clue. “Develop a sense of humor” is one kind of advice. “Don’t lose the one you have” is another kind entirely. As if humor is a possession that can slip away while you’re not paying attention.

David pays attention.

Some days he gets too serious. He notices it the way you’d notice a change in weather: gradually, then all at once. The spiral downward, he calls it. Once it starts, it moves fast. The thing that stops it is a joke. A pun. A moment where he can make himself or someone else laugh.

He lives this deliberately.

In our last conversation, he was on camera with me and decided, mid-sentence, that I needed a laugh. He told me he wasn’t sure whether I was an introvert or an extrovert, but that I might be a pervert. He said it with the timing of someone who has practiced this, because he has. The room changed. We moved on lighter than we arrived.

That is a decision.

I recognized it because I do the same thing. A few weeks ago I was leaving Target with my wife, arms full, and the theft alarm went off at the door. The employee told us we were fine. I turned to my wife and yelled, “Run.” It landed. We laughed the whole way to the car. I made a choice to say it in the moment, because I know what happens when I don’t: when I just walk through the door and move on to the next thing on the list.

The good time doesn’t always show up on its own. You build it.

The same week, I had been reading research on intergenerational contact. I had spent a Friday afternoon with Andrew Middleton, who runs a program in the UK called INDY: I’m Not Done Yet. During our meeting, he mentioned a young colleague, somewhere in her early twenties, and described how much he learns from her. It stopped me.

I had been thinking of intergenerational exchange as a gift flowing in one direction: the experienced giving to the inexperienced. The research says otherwise. The World Health Organization has published data showing that positive intergenerational contact produces benefits for everyone across the exchange. The younger person learns from the older. The older person learns from the younger. The direction runs both ways, and the research is consistent on this.

When I shared this with David, he went straight to Tanzania.

He learned a Swahili greeting there in the 1960s that encodes the same principle. In the that culture, when a younger person meets an elder, the standard greeting changes. Instead of the usual exchange, the younger person says: Shikamoo. It means, literally, I hold your feet. I am at your feet. Under you.

The required response from the elder is: marahaba. I accept your respect.

The greeting names the hierarchy of age out loud and confirms it on both sides before anything else happens. The elder does not perform humility. The younger person does not pretend the difference doesn’t exist. They both say what’s true, and then they talk.

In the same week of research, I found that the generation reporting the most intense experience of ageism in Europe is ages 15 to 24. Young people who feel looked down upon, too inexperienced to have an opinion worth hearing, consistently dismissed by the generations above them. No equivalent study has been done in the United States, though I would not expect dramatically different results.

Shikamoo runs in both directions. Respect across age gaps is a discipline both generations practice toward each other, or neither does it well.

David is 80. He races bicycles. He plays thumb piano for people in retirement communities. He asked me in our last session what it would take to become one of our coaches at Betweenward. He is, by his own account, the only student enrolled at Santa Cruz University: the name he gave his life. Every person who sits across from him is a professor.

He is also, unmistakably, curious. I have been watching it across seven months of conversations. He comes in every week having already been somewhere: a thought, a book, a bat fact, a Swahili greeting he wanted me to have. He does not wait for curiosity to arrive. He goes looking for it.

I asked him directly: is this just who you are, or is this something you built?

He said he’d need two weeks to answer properly. That is itself an answer. A man who, when asked how he maintains his appetite for the world, says let me sit with that and come back with something worth saying.

He did offer one early thought. He told me, with full honesty and no apology, that his curiosity has always been linked to the women in his life. The ones who were smart, who told good stories, who made him laugh. The most curious and productive periods of his life lined up, when he looked back, with the presence of someone like that. Then he said: if we ever put women fully in charge of everything, including the politics, the world will be a better place for all of us. Guys had a nice run. It was a nice try.

He was not performing. He meant it.

I keep coming back to the two women.

One hundred and three years each. Separate conversations, no coordination, identical answers. Whatever you do, don’t ever lose your sense of humor.

They named humor. They spoke of the thing that lets you stay light enough to survive the heavy parts. David’s version of this is practiced rather than passive. It is a skill he has been sharpening since he was 19 years old in Tanzania, learning to be a mjanja: the clever one, the improviser who can pull a room into a story. The man who plays a parking meter and hands the cop his attorney’s business card. The man who, when the moment gets too serious, finds the word that cracks it open.

He is 80. He still does this every week.

The two women who lived to 103 would recognize him immediately.

Where we go next

I asked David to spend the next two weeks figuring out how he made curiosity a habit. How he kept choosing it. Through machine guns in Rio. Through the years selling oranges door to door. Through the graduate program he walked out of, the restaurant he burned out of, the metaphysical license that cost him a story.

We meet on May 4th. He will have sat with the question. I will find out what 40 years of career counseling and 80 years of living have taught him about keeping the appetite alive.

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David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He is, by his own account, an improviser. He is also, by the account of two women who each lived to 103, doing something right.

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

David Thiermann is not a psychic.

He will tell you this himself, though he will also tell you that the Greek root of the word “psychic” is a term meaning sensitivity and that everyone, by that definition, is psychic about something. He has used this information to great effect with the callers who found his name in the Yellow Pages under Spiritual Consultants.

“Are you a psychic?” they’d ask.

“Yes,” he’d say. “Everybody’s a psychic. And the reason you’re calling me is probably that you’re looking for a way to market yourself.”

“Wow,” they’d say. “You really are a psychic. How did you know that?”

He kept that listing for years. It never paid for itself. He kept it anyway, for a reason that says something essential about how David operates: he knew it would eventually produce a good story.

He was right. He just didn’t know the story would involve the Santa Cruz Police Department.

The setup, from the beginning

When David started his consulting business in 1987, his marketing strategy was the Yellow Pages, specifically, the index of the AT&T Yellow Pages, which he went through once a year from A to Z, putting a check mark next to every category that sounded like it might be fun to list himself under. By his count, he ended up under 37 categories. He tracked which ones produced callers and narrowed the list to the ten that were worth keeping.

Spiritual Consultants was not one of the ten. The calls were infrequent and, when they came, tended toward the unusual. There were the psychic callers, whom he handled as described above. And there were the ghost callers.

“Hey, I’ve got a problem. I’ve got a ghost in my house.”

“Okay,” David would say. “You have two choices. If you want to get rid of the ghost, we’ve got to call Ghostbusters. If you want to make friends with the ghost, I want you to document every door slamming, every light going on and off, for the next two days. Then call me back and we’ll take it from there.”

He never heard from them again.

Despite the absence of billable hours, David kept the listing. He knew the patience was going somewhere. Then, one afternoon, a voicemail arrived from a sergeant at the Santa Cruz Police Department.

“Mr. Thiermann, we’ve had a complaint that you’re listed under Spiritual Consultants in the Yellow Pages, and we notice you don’t have a license to practice metaphysics in the city of Santa Cruz.”

David listened to the message and thought: that’s the call I’ve been waiting for.

The license

He called the sergeant back, apologized for not knowing such a license existed, and asked where he could get one. The sergeant directed him to the police station.

There on the wall, among the various licenses the city of Santa Cruz offered to its residents, at the very bottom of the list: Metaphysical License. $50.

David paid the $50. He filled out the forms. They fingerprinted him, the city kept records on palm readers and card readers and people who listed themselves under Spiritual Consultants, he was told, and forwarded the prints to the FBI.

The sergeant said the review would take about six weeks.

Six months went by.

Then an official letter arrived from the city of Santa Cruz, confirming that David Thiermann had been granted a license to practice metaphysics within city limits. The permit number on the document was 002.

He has thought about that number. Somebody filed complaint 001. Whoever that was, probably a competitor, probably another practitioner who knew the licensing rules, had triggered the whole process. David was the second person in the history of Santa Cruz to hold this license.

He filed it under M for Metaphysics and started telling his friends about it. He also started asking them what metaphysics was, since he still wasn’t entirely sure.

The answer he kept getting: physics deals with things you can touch and see: gravity, tables, chairs. Meta is the Greek word for “above and beyond.” Metaphysics is everything else: the things you can’t touch or see or measure.

“Oh,” David said. “Thanks for telling me.”

He put the license back in the file and waited to find out what to do with it.

The renewal

A year passed. Nothing remarkable happened with the license. David considered letting it expire. Then he decided no, he would renew it. He called the police station.

The secretary answered. He told her he wanted to renew his metaphysical license.

“You don’t need to renew that,” she said. “It’s a lifelong license.”

He pushed back. He told her he suspected they wanted another $50.

“Trust me,” she said. “You never have to renew it. It’s lifelong.”

He hung up.

Four days later, the sergeant called.

“Mr. Thiermann, we’ve revoked your license. You failed to renew it in time.”

David told him about the conversation with the secretary. The sergeant said she didn’t know what she was talking about. And now, if David wanted to reinstate his license to practice metaphysics in the city of Santa Cruz, the process was somewhat more involved than it had been before.

The fee was $1,500.

Additionally, city officials would visit his office and inspect every business within 300 yards to make sure they were all up to code. Additionally, David would need to appear before the Santa Cruz City Planning Commission.

David walked over to the planning commission. An elderly woman came out from behind the counter. She recognized him, his name had appeared in the local papers a few times, human interest stories.

“Are you David Thiermann?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

She explained the process. The $1,500. The inspections. And one more item: he would then need to appear before the full Santa Cruz City Council, where the members would cross-examine him to determine whether he actually qualified as a metaphysician.

David looked at her. He did not have $1,500. He told her he had some appointments and asked if he could get back to her.

He walked out. He never went back.

The story that didn’t happen

This is the part David still thinks about.

If he had had the $1,500, he would have paid it. He knew everyone on the city council. He would have appeared before them and subjected himself to cross-examination on the subject of metaphysics in which he held a license, from the police station, permit number 002. He was certain it would have landed on the front page of every local newspaper in town.

He still has the license. It is still in the file, under M.

He mentioned, in our conversation, that he might go back to the police station now. Just to see. Just to find out if the story is still available.

The sage

Not long after David graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1971, he was back in town and ran into Chancellor Dean McHenry (the man who had built the university) in a local restaurant. McHenry stopped when he saw him. He looked at David for a moment and said: “You have become a sage.”

David felt it land. He didn’t think about it much at the time.

He has been thinking about it lately.

A sage, he’s learned, is a wise soul keen to learn, someone who never mistakes the credential for the education, who treats curiosity as an obligation rather than a personality trait. David’s website is called Santa Cruz University. He describes himself as the only student enrolled there. Every client who sits across from him is a professor.

He has been practicing metaphysics, the things above and beyond what can be touched or measured, for his entire adult life. He did not need the license.

Permit number 002 is still in the file, in case someone ever asks.

Why this matters

David kept the Spiritual Consultants listing for years. He tracked his Yellow Pages categories the way a scientist tracks data — note which ones produce a return, cut the ones that don’t. Spiritual Consultants produced no billable clients and cost money every year.

He kept it anyway. Not because he expected a return. Because he believed, on no particular evidence, that it was building toward something.

That is a specific kind of patience that encore careers require. The thing you maintain for years that doesn’t pay, the connection you hold onto, the skill you keep practicing, the listing you refuse to delete, because you sense it’s going somewhere. Some investments are measured in what they return this year. Others are measured in the story they eventually produce.

David got his story. He just didn’t pay the $1,500.

Where we go next

Two threads are still waiting: the Tanzanian woman David met in 1965 — the nurse who studied in Ireland and came home speaking Swahili with an Irish accent — and the question of what curiosity looks like when it becomes a practice rather than a personality trait.

We’re going in on both.

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David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He holds a license to practice metaphysics in the city of Santa Cruz, permit number 002. The license is in a file. The file is in a storage container. The story is here.

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

There was a phone call David Thiermann almost didn’t take.

It was 1972. He was renting a room in Santa Cruz. He had just dropped out of a master’s program at UC Berkeley, walked away after calling out a professor for reading his own textbook aloud to a roomful of sleeping graduate students, and the pride that had gotten him through Tanzania, through Brazil, through a machine gun raid in Rio and a televised thumb piano performance and a year collecting instruments across every country in South America except Venezuela had landed him here: depressed, broke, and convinced he was a failure.

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He had been student body president at UC Santa Cruz. He had run a leprosy hospital at 19. He had won first place on Brazilian television.

None of that helped when the phone rang.

The caller was a man named Tom. Tom had recently made the mistake of building a sauna inside a closet using a wood-burning stove, which was how he burned his rented house down. All he had left was an old Ford pickup truck and a pair of boots. His father, who worked for the fire department in Southern California, had given him enough money to haul two tons of oranges up from the south and try to sell them at the flea market for a small profit.

Tom was losing that bet. The oranges were rotting. He needed help.

David hung up on him.

He was a former student body president. His professors at UC Santa Cruz might see him. He had an image to protect.

He sat there. He thought about it. He picked the phone back up.

“You know what? I just thought: you don’t have a plan. You better start doing something — it doesn’t matter what it is. And who gives a hoot what people think?”

He went to the flea market. They got rid of two tons by the five-pound sack. Then they bought four tons. Then eight. They knocked on every door in Santa Cruz County, one side of the street each, handing out samples, selling by the forty-pound box, buying for ten dollars and selling for twenty.

The former ambassador of Tanzania and Brazil was going door to door, doubling his money on citrus.

He became known in Santa Cruz as the Orange Man.

The $50 garage

When eight tons of oranges require somewhere to live, you find a garage.

They found one on a downtown Santa Cruz street for fifty dollars a month. The previous tenant was a German mechanic who had developed a drinking problem and gone out of business — he’d been repairing Volkswagens in there, and the floor was thick with grease and old transmissions. David and Tom poured muriatic acid over everything, hauled the transmissions to the dump, built sliding doors across the open front, and moved the produce in.

At night, after selling all day, they’d go back to the garage to hang out with friends. There was a blender. Then smoothies. Then a beer and wine license. Then thirty employees. Then an open stage — no auditions, no gatekeeping — running from ten in the morning until midnight, seven days a week.

In four years, the $50 garage became the Good Fruit Company.

David was the MC and the bartender. He never auditioned anyone. The stage held strip tease, belly dancing, juggling, fire eating, sword swallowing, lectures on every subject, every kind of music. If you could perform, you were welcome.

He loved it. He also ran it for four years without a single vacation, working fifteen-hour days every day of the week.

“I got to the point where I just didn’t have any more love to give to people.”

He sold it. The buyers renamed it Tropical Barbecue and started selling barbecued rabbit. Santa Cruz was not ready for that, and they went under.

The nose flute and the identical instruments

When the Good Fruit Company was someone else’s problem, a friend offered David a trip to Tahiti. He went.

He was there for six weeks, studying French Polynesian musical instruments, comparing them against the ones he’d found in the Amazon while working in Brazil. What he discovered surprised him: they were identical. The same instruments, on opposite sides of the world, having arrived there by routes no one could fully trace.

A retired French Polynesian chieftain named Tai Mai Tutu taught him to play the nose flute. It looks like a bamboo flute you’d normally play with your mouth — except you hold it to your nostril and blow air through that instead. You get a tune out of it. David can still play it.

This is consistent with a pattern you can track across his whole life: David tends to find, in places that seem entirely different from each other, the same deep thing. The leprosarium in Tanzania and the flea market in Santa Cruz. The Amazon instruments and the Tahitian ones. The career counselor’s question and the mjanja’s invitation into fiction. He keeps arriving at the same discovery from different directions: the human equipment is the same everywhere. The specific story differs. The underlying need does not.

Door to door, the second time

David came back from Tahiti and needed money. He went back to selling oranges — this time, only to offices.

He worked every office building in Santa Cruz County, from Boulder Creek to Aptos. He’d walk in with a forty-pound box and a question: what are you guys really doing in here? And if you’re successful, why are you successful?

Because he was the Orange Man (familiar, local, useful) people gave him tours. They told him their business secrets. He got to know the internal logic of every enterprise in the county by delivering citrus.

One of his customers, a woman who sold ceramics, noticed he was burning out. She offered him a trade: a session with a career counselor she had scheduled and wasn’t going to use. David thought: why not.

He met the counselor in a coffee shop. For an hour, the man listened while David talked about his life and career. The counselor took notes. He fed them back.

David walked out into the Santa Cruz afternoon and thought: that was kind of fun. Maybe I’ll just do that.

That was 1987. He has not stopped.

$35 an hour and what happened next

He started the same way he started everything: with no credentials and a willingness to figure it out in the room.

He met clients in coffee shops. He listened. He wrote down the story of their whole life and read it back to them. They found this therapeutic. He found it interesting. He charged nothing until his savings ran out at which point he told his next client the rate was $35 an hour, mostly because he couldn’t believe anyone would pay.

They said: sure, where do I send the check?

After about a year, he raised it to $55 because he was booked full. Then a clinical psychologist called who was, by David’s description, something of a bully on the phone. He told her the rate was $110 an hour, hoping she’d say no.

She showed up and paid it.

That became the rate.

What the Orange Man years were actually about

I thought about David’s story this week alongside something I’ve been sitting with from our conversation — the way he described coming back to Santa Cruz in 1972, depressed, renting a room, feeling like a failure for leaving grad school.

Here’s what he had already done by then: He had lived inside a leprosy hospital for three years and turned it into a functioning business. He had survived a political raid at gunpoint in Rio. He had won a national television competition in Brazil. He had traveled every country in South America collecting instruments. He had studied Haitian Vodou ceremonies and organized a public health dispensary in Haiti. He had completed a Ministry of Health television series.

He was 26 years old. He felt like a failure because he couldn’t sit through a professor reading from his own textbook.

Most of us carry some version of this. The record of experience we discount because it doesn’t match the credential we expected to hold by now. The life that happened while we were making other plans, and that we’re not sure counts.

The Orange Man years are the chapter where David stopped auditing his own life against someone else’s rubric and started doing the next thing in front of him. The flea market. The garage. The open stage. Tahiti. The office buildings. A coffee shop and a man who listened.

All of it led somewhere. None of it looked, in the moment, like it was supposed to.

Where we go next

Two stories are still waiting.

The first: what happened when David Thiermann listed himself in the Yellow Pages under Spiritual Consultants — and how he ended up with a license to practice metaphysics in the city of Santa Cruz.

The second is older and quieter. It goes back to Tanzania, to a woman David met there — a nurse who had studied in Ireland and came home speaking Swahili with an Irish accent. He has been circling that story for weeks.

We’re going in.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He has worked in a leprosarium, run a restaurant, crossed the county selling fruit, studied instruments on four continents, and spent 40 years helping people figure out what to do with their lives. He is, by his own account, an improviser.

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

There is a dream David Thiermann has been carrying around since a couple of weeks ago, and he wants to tell you about it.

He was on a white horse, riding bareback up a steep sand dune with his father and his father’s girlfriend. The horse was powerful enough to carry all three of them, and it would lunge forward three or four steps and then slide back two or three in the loose sand, but it kept going, and eventually they made it to the top.

At the summit, an old man — David puts him at 93 — was waiting with a jar of honey. But the honey was black. When David asked about it, the man said: “I figured out how to teach flies to make honey.”

Then David was somehow in New York City, standing next to a parking meter on a busy street. He started playing it with his hands — percussion, like any instrument — and the sound was beautiful enough that all the cars stopped, all the people on the sidewalk stopped, and stood there listening. A police officer finally came over and told him he needed to stop because he was creating too much attention.

David pulled out his attorney’s business card and handed it to the officer.

That was the end of the dream.

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I tell you this not as a detour but because it tells you something essential about the man.

David Thiermann has spent 40 years helping people figure out what to do with their lives. Over 5,000 clients, by his count — enough files to fill a rented storage container in Santa Cruz, each banker box holding a whole human story: grandparents, early memories, the years that shaped them, and then, at the end of the intake process, a single game he played with every single one of them.

But the dream tells you what the career counseling never quite says out loud: that this man has always believed a parking meter can be an instrument if you’re paying attention. That an obstacle can be a sound. That when someone in authority tells you to stop making beautiful things, the correct response is to produce your attorney’s business card.

He does not give this advice. He lives it.

“I’m an improviser. End of story. That’s it. That’s who I am. Everything I do is improv.”

That’s David this week, arriving at something he says he’s been trying to find the words for. When people ask who he is and what he does, he’s always reached for something clever or descriptive — career counselor, consultant, musician, connector. But the word he’s landing on now is simpler than all of them.

Improviser.

It means, he says, that he can’t memorize a script. He tells this with real glee: a client once asked him to play the dysfunctional alcoholic father in his feature film — a small role, just two lines. David practiced those two lines with his partner Marilyn hundreds of times. When the director and the camera arrived, he forgot both of them entirely and had to read off the page.

He has enormous respect for anyone who can do it differently. He can only work in the present tense, with what the room gives him.

This, it turns out, is not a limitation. It is his entire methodology.

The business license says 1987. Santa Cruz. General consultant.

But that’s not actually when it started.

It started in 1965, when David was 19 years old, newly arrived at a leprosarium in Tanzania with no Swahili, no plan, and roughly a thousand patients who needed something to do. He was, by his own description, a naive idealistic kid trying to figure out how to help. What he noticed was that the patients needed employment — something to make, something to sell, something that returned them their dignity.

He saw a man playing an African thumb piano. He bought it. He asked the man to make another one. Then another. Then twenty different kinds of musical instruments.

He called the operation Ufundi Makete — Swahili for “skills near the leprosarium.” He was 19 years old and he had just started his first career counseling practice, though he wouldn’t have called it that for another 22 years.

When he did take out the business license in 1987, his strategy was pure improvisation.

He got out the AT&T Yellow Pages and went through the index, A through Z, putting a small check mark next to every category that sounded like it might be fun. He ended up listed under 37 different categories. When a client called, he’d ask: “How were you referred to me?” And when they said the Yellow Pages, he’d ask which section. He tracked the responses, year after year, until he’d narrowed 37 categories down to about 10 that were worth keeping.

Career planning and development turned out to be the one that fit best. Not because he planned it that way. Because the room kept giving it to him.

(He also, at some point, listed himself under Spiritual Consultants. What happened when he did this is a story for next time. He promises it will blow your mind.

Here is what David did with every one of those 5,000 clients.

First, he wrote down their entire life story. Not a summary — the whole thing, starting with their grandparents. What the family was like. What the neighborhood was like. Which years shaped them and how. He went forward through every year of their life up to the present.

Then he played a game.

He asked them to pretend they were already dead — looking back over their lives from some point in the future. And from that vantage point, he asked them to tell him, year by year, how they would ideally like their lives to have turned out. If they could have had it exactly their way. If they could have had it all.

“It’s amazing,” he says, “what people come up with when you allow them to visualize, ideally, how year-by-year they would like the rest of their life to turn out.”

He is not describing a therapy exercise or a journaling prompt. He is describing what happens when you remove the pressure of the present tense — all the practical objections, the fears, the voices that say be realistic — and let someone speak from the future they actually want.

That future is usually much bigger than the one they came in with.

You want to know what that game produces?

Meet Dr. Paul Gahlinger.

When Gahlinger first sat across from David in Santa Cruz, he had already been a bush pilot as a teenager in Canada. He’d spent years traveling the world. He’d earned a PhD in medical anthropology and a master’s in public health and epidemiology from UC Berkeley. He was, at the time, a professor of biostatistics at San Jose State.

He was bored.

David ran the surveys and biographical inventories. The results came back pointing toward one category: poultry veterinarian.

“I don’t want to work with chickens,” Gahlinger said.

There was another category in the same column. David looked at it.

Surgeon.

He persuaded Gahlinger to go to medical school at UC Davis. During his third year, Gahlinger was still flying — a Cessna 172 with an extra fuel tank strapped into the backseat. He flew it from UC Davis up to Newfoundland, then across the Atlantic. He landed in Ireland with ice on the wings and roughly a gallon of fuel left.

He flew around the pyramids in Cairo during a sandstorm. He sold the plane to someone in Cairo and kept moving.

His first job after medical school was medical director of Johnston Atoll — a remote Pacific outpost where the United States government sends its chemical weapons to be diffused. Gahlinger walked the grounds with four hypodermic needles on his belt, in case something went wrong and he needed to inject himself.

Then he decided to fly his own plane to Peru to study shamanism. On the way back, air traffic control told him he was a thousand feet higher than he actually was. He flew into a mountain in Guatemala. Having been a bush pilot since his teens, he knew what to do: he ran the plane through a line of trees to slow the fuselage, knocked the wings off, and walked away. His girlfriend was with him.

She was, David reports, quite impressed.

Gahlinger eventually wrote the definitive American textbook on illegal drugs — 172 substances, requiring research trips to Africa and around the world. He is currently an occupational medicine physician at a hospital in Fresno, married to a woman from the Philippines whom he is putting through nursing school. David sees their photographs on Facebook.

“Every time I see those photographs,” he says, “of people who are just so happy together, it gives me hope for the human race.”

This is what career counseling looks like when the counselor is an improviser. You don’t plan the destination. You look at what the person can do, where their energy actually lives, and you name the door. Whether they fly through it in a Cessna 172 with a gas tank in the backseat is up to them.

Somewhere in Santa Cruz, in a rented storage container, there are over 5,000 client files in banker boxes.

In each file is a life: grandparents, childhood, every year up to the moment someone sat down across from David Thiermann and played the game. The one where you pretend you’re already dead, and tell the truth about how you wanted it all to go.

David didn’t set out to become a career counselor. He set out to help a thousand leprosy patients in Tanzania have something to do with their hands. He set out to check 37 boxes in the Yellow Pages and see which ones rang. He set out to improvise.

At 80, he would tell you that’s still the method. That every next chapter starts the same way: not with a plan, but with a question.

What would you say, if you were looking back from the end?

What would you want to have done?

Where we go next

Next week: the story of what happened when David Thiermann listed himself in the Yellow Pages under Spiritual Consultants. Maybe?

David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He has worked in a leprosarium, been an administrator, restaurateur, percussionist, career counselor, and now, reluctantly, a subject.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

About the Author

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

We had been promising to hear the thumb piano. Three chapters in. Several conversations deep. An instrument that has opened doors across four continents, charmed Jane Goodall, and won first place on Brazilian television.

And when David finally held it up to his iPhone and played—nothing came through.

The microphone couldn’t pick it up. The frequency was too quiet, or the angle was wrong, or the technology that lets two men talk across 300 miles of California coastline simply wasn’t built for a 60-year-old instrument made by a patient in a Tanzanian hospital.

David tried repositioning the phone. He tried again. Still nothing. Finally he laughed and said he’d make a recording and send it later.

I sat there thinking: this is the most technologically honest thing that’s happened in the series so far. An instrument that has carried one man’s life across decades, and the screen couldn’t hold its sound.

Some things still require presence.

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Where the thumb piano came from—really

In Chapters 1 and 2, the thumb piano appeared as a kind of magic key: the thing David carried into rooms to signal trust. But I hadn’t yet asked the harder question—not what it does, but why it stuck.

This time, David answered plainly.

He arrived in Tanzania in 1965. He was 19 years old. He had taken Swahili courses at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and at a teachers’ training college in Dar es Salaam, but he wasn’t fluent. He certainly didn’t know the local Kinyakyusa language.

And he was alone.

No other Americans nearby. No other “white people” around. He was cooking his own food on a one-burner kerosene stove on the floor. He was carrying water from the river and boiling it to avoid amoebic dysentery. He was washing his clothes by hand on a rack.

“I was feeling pretty insecure,” he said. “So I was looking for a way to create some more security for me, and music was the way to do that.”

He had brought a Gibson guitar from the States. He played an autoharp with a harmonica strapped to a holder so he could play both at once. But the instrument that changed everything was the one he didn’t bring, rather, it was the one he found.

He saw a man at the leprosarium playing an African thumb piano. David asked if he could buy it, and whether the man would be willing to make another. That transaction became the seed of a workshop that eventually produced over twenty different kinds of instruments, run by the patients themselves.

The thumb piano was less a souvenir, than it was a survival strategy born from loneliness and turned into connection. David learned to play it so the people he lived with could hear him trying. And it worked because the effort was legible.

They called him Bwana Marimba—the marimba man. The instrument itself, in the local language, was called the tongo mali. And when David walked through the area playing it, keeping his thumbs in rhythm with his feet, people followed. He compared himself, grinning, to the Pied Piper of Hamelin—”not that I’m trying to get rid of rats or children, but it feels good if somebody’s willing to follow me around while I’m playing it because they like the music.”

The tradition behind the thumb piano carried its own logic: if you can keep a rhythm going with your thumbs and your thumbs don’t get tired, neither will your legs. You can walk long distances as long as you can keep your thumbs moving. Music as engine. Music as endurance.

The night in Dar es Salaam

Not every story about the thumb piano ends with applause.

David was 19, still new to Tanzania, still learning the rhythms of the place. One evening he went out to hear Congolese jazz in Dar es Salaam. He made friends with a bouncer named Simba—lion, in Swahili—and met a Tanzanian woman who asked him to walk her home after the show.

David agreed. He had no intention beyond courtesy. He was playing his thumb piano as they walked through the dark streets.

Then a taxi began circling the block. It circled again. Then it stopped in front of them, and four or five men got out.

They grabbed the woman. They ripped her clothes. They tore the jewelry from her neck. And they took David’s thumb piano—one of his first—and threw it on the ground, where it shattered.

David’s reaction surprised even him. He grabbed one of the men, lifted him into the air, and threw him into the street. He still doesn’t know how he did it. The men jumped back into the taxi and disappeared.

The story could end there—young man, dangerous city, adrenaline—but what David remembered most vividly, decades later, was the rage he felt when they destroyed his instrument. Not the fear for his own body. Not the shock of the confrontation. The instrument.

“Sometimes in your life you’re so emotionally connected to something,” he said, “that if you lose it, you have super strength in terms of how you react.”

I told him I understood. When I was young, my father had lupus and was having a serious reaction. The ambulance was on the way, but our car was blocking the driveway and we couldn’t find the keys. It was one of those old 4x4 wagons with the wood panel siding—heavy as a promise. I pushed it out of the way by myself. I still don’t know how I did it either.

Some emergencies bypass the body’s normal rules. The question is what triggers that bypass: fear, love, or the feeling that something irreplaceable is about to be gone.

The names on the wall

David has a habit of dropping famous names the way other people mention neighbors—casually, mid-sentence, as if proximity to greatness were just geography.

This chapter gave us three.

Bonnie Raitt. David grew up going to the same camps she did. They knew each other as kids. Now, when she comes to Santa Cruz for a concert, David goes to the afterparty and hugs her like a cousin. He says everyone stares: How do you know her? He shrugs.

Ry Cooder. David’s first guitar teacher. They went to the same high school in Santa Monica. Cooder went on to become a legendary musician and filmmaker—his documentary work with Cuban musicians became one of the most celebrated music films of its era. David talks about him the way you’d talk about a lab partner who turned out to be a genius: with warmth, no envy, and a little wonder.

Bob Dylan. This one deserves its own frame.

The cyclist and the rock wall

It was 1972. David had just left a master’s program in public health at UC Berkeley—because he couldn’t handle the boredom.

He told me a story about that departure that says everything about his temperament. A professor named Jim Cunningham was teaching a communications course by reading aloud from his own textbook. David looked around and saw every student in the room falling asleep. So he interrupted: “Hey Jim, I understand you’re an expert on communications theory, but if you just look around the room, you can see everybody’s fallen asleep.”

The professor turned red and left the room. The students woke up and told David to keep his mouth shut—they were just trying to get their credentials. David followed Cunningham to his office and apologized. Cunningham told him he was right, that he should have left the university twenty years ago. He took David to dinner and tried to convince him to stay.

David took a leave of absence and never went back.

He moved in with his mother in Santa Monica and picked up his old exercise habit: racing a Masi Italian bicycle from Santa Monica to Malibu and back, about 35 miles round trip. Crash helmet, special shoes, jersey, pumping hard along the coast.

One day, pedaling through Malibu, he passed a man sitting on a rock wall near a flower shop. Hunched over. Alone.

David rode past. Then he thought: That looked like Bob Dylan.

He kept going. He told himself not to bother the man, it was probably the first five minutes of peace he’d had in years. Then he turned around.

He got off the bike. You could hear the cleats clicking across Highway One. He walked right up and did what David always does: pretended they’d known each other forever.

“Hey, Bob, how’s it going?”

Dylan didn’t look up.

David kept talking. He told Dylan he appreciated his music. He mentioned his instrument collection. He said he was staying at a mansion in Beverly Hills—his brother was caretaking the place, next door to Dean Martin’s house—and invited Dylan to come see his instruments.

Finally, Dylan looked up. David knew then it was really him.

Dylan said four words: “But why me?”

David told him he seemed like a cool guy. He talked about his African thumb piano. Dylan said he knew some guys in Chicago who played thumb pianos. Then he asked: “Have you got a business card?”

David was in a cycling outfit. He did not have a business card.

They parted. David got back on his bike. That was the whole interaction.

He told me he felt sorry for Dylan at the time—his hands were swollen, his health looked rough, he seemed worn down. David thinks it was shortly after Dylan’s motorcycle accident.

When I asked if Dylan might have taken him up on the offer, David said what he always says when a door doesn’t open: “You never know. You never know, right?”

Smoke, feelings, and the trick that worked

Between the big stories, David and I wandered into a conversation about nicotine—how addictive it is, how it hooks you through secondary smoke, how David got hooked as a child because his stepmother smoked a pack a day inside the house.

He smoked unfiltered Camels. He wanted to quit. He went to a psychologist, and she gave him advice that changed the pattern.

She told him: before you light up, notice that you’re probably feeling something—anger, hurt, sadness, fear, love. The nicotine will temporarily numb those feelings. You’ll still have to deal with them later. But if you sit quietly for ten minutes and let yourself feel what you’re feeling, see if you still want to light up after that.

It worked.

That’s a story about the distance between a feeling and a habit—and the ten-minute gap where a different choice lives.

I shared my own version: Marlboro Reds under a Marine cover, not a cowboy hat. Smoking and chewing tobacco on deployments, then stopping cold when I came home to family. David laughed when he asked if I was wearing a cowboy hat. I told him it was a Marine hat. We moved on the way men do when they’ve traded enough vulnerability for one afternoon.

Why this matters

This chapter is about origins—the real ones, not the polished ones.

David didn’t fall in love with the thumb piano because it was exotic or beautiful. He fell in love with it because he was 19, alone, scared, and unable to speak the language of the people around him. The instrument was a bridge he built out of necessity, and he’s been walking across it for sixty years.

That’s the part of reinvention nobody puts on the brochure. Before the confidence comes the insecurity. Before the connection comes the loneliness. Before the story you tell at parties comes the night in Dar es Salaam when someone broke the thing you loved and you found out what you were made of.

If you’re 50 or 60 or 70 and standing at the edge of something unfamiliar—a new city, a new identity, a new room full of strangers—David’s life suggests that the way in is not through credentials or confidence. It’s through something small you can carry, something you’re willing to offer before anyone asks, and the nerve to keep showing up even when the technology can’t capture your sound.

Chapter objects

If Chapter 1 gave us the stage and Chapter 2 gave us the game, Chapter 3 gives us the source:

A one-burner kerosene stove on a floor in Tanzania—the loneliness that made the music necessary.

A shattered thumb piano in Dar es Salaam—the night David learned what he’d fight for.

Cleats clicking across Highway One—the sound of a man deciding to turn around and say hello to Bob Dylan.

A Tupperware container—where David keeps his most valuable instrument, sealed against moisture, stored like something sacred inside something ordinary.

A recording that arrived days later—proof that some sounds don’t travel well through screens, and that the best things in life still ask you to come closer.

And then the sound arrived

A few days after our call, my phone buzzed. David had sent the recording.

I pressed play and heard something I wasn’t prepared for: quiet. The thumb piano doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t fill a room the way a guitar or a horn does. The notes are soft and metallic, almost liquid—like someone tapping out a message on tiny bells submerged just below the surface of water. Each pluck hangs in the air for a half-second longer than you expect, and the spaces between the notes carry as much weight as the notes themselves.

It’s the kind of sound you lean into. You have to come closer to hear it. And maybe that’s the whole point—maybe that’s why it works as a trust-building instrument. It doesn’t overpower a room. It invites the room to come to it.

I played the recording three times. The third time, I stopped thinking about the series and just listened. The sound is gentle, almost private, and completely at odds with the enormous life it has helped build. Fifteen thousand people at the Berkeley Folk Festival. Brazilian television. Jane Goodall’s smile. Bob Dylan’s “But why me?” All of it started with a sound this soft.

Where we go next

Next week, I want to go deeper into Tanzania. Three years is a long time to live inside someone else’s world. I want to know what David carried home that he couldn’t put in a suitcase—and what he left behind that he still reaches for.

Because now I’ve heard the instrument. And the longer we talk, the more I realize this series is about one man’s extraordinary life and about the ordinary materials extraordinary lives are made from: loneliness, nerve, a broken instrument, a psychologist’s advice about sitting with your feelings, the willingness to pedal past Bob Dylan and then turn around—and a sound so soft you have to come closer to hear it.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

About the Author

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

David opened our second conversation the same way he opens a lot of doors: with a compliment and a grin.

“That color looks pretty darn good on you,” he said, looking at my shirt on camera. Then he followed it with a jab that landed like a friendly elbow: “When you wear those kinds of shirts, people think you play golf, right?”

It was an ordinary start. Two men on a Monday afternoon. Santa Cruz on his side. Southern California on mine. Coffee in the background. Life rolling forward.

And then, as usual with David, a small moment turned into a lesson about how the world works.

Chapter 1 was about the stage—Pete Seeger, 15,000 people, and an African thumb piano. This chapter is about something quieter and more powerful: the rules of the game.

Because David has spent a lifetime switching between worlds (countries, professions, languages, social circles), he learned early that the difference between connection and conflict often comes down to one thing: whether people know what game you’re playing.

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The thumb piano as a key

When I asked David what drove him to help one of his career counseling clients meet Jane Goodall, he started with an honest motive: he wanted an excuse to go, and he wanted to give his client a moment she’d never forget.

Her name was Deborah. She had lived several lives herself, professional model, image consultant, jewelry business, and designer. In one session, David asked her a simple question: “Is there a woman on the planet whom you respect a lot and would love to meet someday?”

Deborah said quickly: Jane Goodall.

David checked the calendar and discovered Goodall was giving a lecture at the Flint Center at De Anza College the following week. “Would you like to go with me?” he asked.

Deborah’s body started shaking just imagining being in the same room with her. Mainly because some forms of public recognition turn human beings into untouchable objects in our minds.

They went. They sat in the balcony, far enough away that Goodall looked “about an inch high,” David said. When the lecture ended, David turned to Deborah and said, “We’re going to go meet her now.”

He hadn’t met Goodall before either, he told me. That detail didn’t slow him down.

They walked toward the stage. Security formed the usual perimeter. And somehow David and Deborah got through.

David had brought the same tool he carried into so many unfamiliar rooms: his African thumb piano.

He walked right up to Jane Goodall like they were old friends. “Hey Jane,” he said. “It’s really great to see you. I wanted to play you a little tune on my African thumb piano.”

Goodall knew the instrument. She had worked in Tanzania. David played. Introductions happened. Hugs happened. Deborah shook like a leaf while holding the kind of moment people think they’ll never be allowed to have.

Then David asked for a photograph. Goodall said yes. They took the picture.

To David, the whole scene made perfect sense: “She’s just another human being.”

And then he said the line that should be printed on the back of every glossy magazine cover: publicity can make someone feel untouchable, even when they never chased that status in the first place. I thought to myself, indeed.

Gravity doesn’t care who you are

David has a way of pulling the conversation back to the body. In the middle of our talk about fame and access, he shrugged and reminded me, “Regardless of our notoriety, we’re all dealing with gravity—and it never gives up.”

I told him about my own small encounter with gravity that week: a breakfast burrito, a cup of water, too much in my hands, and an unthinking moment where I dropped the cup and spilled water everywhere in a coffee shop. The kind of mess that makes you blush for a second, until you remember everyone has been there.

David riffed immediately: “They say don’t cry over spilled milk. What do you say when you spill water?”

I told him, “Let it evaporate.”

This is part of the point. Humor is a social technology. It lowers threat. It reopens attention. It gives people room to breathe together.

The pollinator of Santa Cruz

David called himself, through a friend’s nickname, “the pollinator of Santa Cruz.” He connects people the way bees connect fields: not because he needs the credit, but because he can’t help noticing what might happen if two lives touched.

He told me why he does it. If he introduces two people he respects, he gets to sit back and listen to how they draw each other out. He learns things he would never learn in a one-on-one conversation, because people reveal different parts of themselves when a third mind enters the room.

He gave me an example from his life right now: a monthly coffee conversation with a friend named Bruce, someone who once helped start the Santa Cruz Guitar Company, later became a marriage and family therapist, and now travels the world sourcing specialty acoustic wood for major guitar makers. David recently met another man, a psychiatrist with more than five decades of practice. He invited both of them to coffee—not to perform, but to listen.

That’s what a connector does. He shares stories, and he creates conditions for more stories to happen.

Back to Tanzania: the two words that changed everything

At a certain point, I asked David the question that matters for this whole project: where did you pick that up? Where did this instinct to connect, to improvise, to read a room come from?

He answered in plain language.

David spent three years in Tanzania (1965–1968). When he arrived, he had to learn Swahili. Then he learned greetings in the local language of the people he lived with, the Nyakyusa.

In that culture, he said, storytelling was entertainment and a social skill. It was a way to earn respect, make friends, and prove you could move with the group instead of against it.

David told me he realized he needed to become an “mjanja” rather than an “mjinga.”

He spelled them out:

Mjanja (M-J-A-N-J-A): the clever one, the improviser, the storyteller who can make something up on the spot and pull a crowd into it.

Mjinga (M-J-I-N-G-A): the fool—the person who can’t read the fiction, can’t play along, can’t create the story.

David wanted to be the insider who could participate. He wanted to be respected. So he practiced. He learned how to make up stories. He learned how to invite people into play.

And it worked. He made friends quickly. He got embedded. He became fluent in the social rhythm of the place.

But then he came home.

The LA Times walkout

Here’s the problem with learning a powerful cultural skill: you can forget it has context.

David told me that when he returned to the United States, he was still in “mjanja mode.” He was still making up stories—sometimes for fun, sometimes because improvisation had become natural.

His father was proud of him for doing meaningful work in a hospital for three years. He invited groups of people to dinner. David showed slides from Africa and told stories.

Then his father invited another group the next week, and David told a completely different set of stories.

His father misinterpreted it as lying. He got worried. He thought something might be wrong with his son.

Then the organization that had sent David to Africa, the American Friends Service Committee, asked him to sit down for an interview with two Los Angeles Times reporters in Pasadena.

David walked into that office and made a mistake that still feels vivid decades later: he didn’t explain the game.

He didn’t tell them, “I’m about to show you how storytelling works in the culture I lived in.” He didn’t say, “For the next few minutes, we’re going to talk in fiction.”

He just started making things up on the spot.

The reporters were disturbed. They walked out.

It’s one of those moments you can feel in your gut even through someone else’s memory: a door that was open, closing mid-step.

David’s takeaway became clarity.

If you’re talking in nonfiction, and you want to shift into fiction, you have to name it. You have to tell the other person what rules you’re using. Otherwise, they will experience you as dishonest—even if you’re trying to invite them into something deeper.

“If I can get you to agree,” David said, “for the next five minutes to talk in fiction where we just make stuff up as we go along, we can have a lot of fun… and sometimes we’ll say things that are even more truthful than if we were talking in nonfiction.”

This is the heart of the chapter. The lesson is “improvise.” And the lesson is “set the context.”

Comedy, improv, and the truth hiding in embarrassment

David connected this idea to something he learned over decades of career counseling, including work with professional comedians.

Comedians, he told me, all said some version of the same thing: when you get on stage, announce who you are. Tell the audience you’re a comedian. If you don’t, they’ll feel insulted by what you say.

Then you do the second move: you tell the truth about embarrassing subject matter. People laugh because they recognize themselves in it. The body reacts before the mind can defend itself.

I told David my spilled-water story again and admitted the truth: yes, most of the time when I make people laugh, I’m laughing at myself first.

David’s point landed clean: humor is often truth wearing a safer shirt.

Why this matters

This is where David’s story stops being a fascinating personal history and turns into a field manual for the rest of us.

If you’re building a new chapter of life after 50, you’re going to step into rooms where you don’t know the rules: new industries, new communities, new identities, new rhythms. You’ll be tempted to perform. You’ll be tempted to hide. You’ll be tempted to apologize for being new.

David shows a different path: declare the game you’re playing and invite people into it.

That’s what the thumb piano has been for him. It’s an instrument, yes. It’s also a signal. A way to say, “I’m safe. I’m curious. I’m here to connect,” before the words arrive.

It’s also what I try to do in my work on “What Time Binds”: help people rebuild shared meaning when our tools and our emotions push us into misreadings. We get into trouble when we assume the other person is playing the same game we are. We get out of trouble when we clarify the rules together.

David’s LA Times walkout is a small story with a big warning label: don’t make people guess your intent.

Chapter objects

If Chapter 1 gave us the stage and the crowd, Chapter 2 gives us a new set of “chapter objects”—anchors that can hold the memory in place:

• Two Swahili words: “mjanja” and “mjinga.”

• An office in Pasadena where an interview ended early.

• A simple rule: name the game before you play it.

• A thumb piano that keeps opening doors.

Where we go next

Next week, I’m going to ask David to bring the thumb piano and play it on camera. I want to hear it—not as a symbol, but as sound. Then I’m going to do what I do: describe what I heard, and ask what that sound has carried for him across decades.

Because the longer we talk, the clearer the pattern gets: David doesn’t use music to escape life. He uses music to enter it—one room, one handshake, one story at a time.

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About the Author

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

He drove up in a ’63 Bug with a small instrument in his hands and a slightly reckless idea in his head: “Let me on the stage.”

The producer brushed him off. So, David scanned the crowd, spotted Pete Seeger talking with friends, and walked right up as if they’d shared coffee a hundred times. He leaned in, introduced himself using the name he carried in Africa—“ Daudi Mohammed”—and played a short tune into Seeger’s ear on an African thumb piano.

Later, Seeger called him up. David remembers sitting there, smoking a whole pack, convinced he’d been forgotten—until the signal came and the crowd did what crowds do when something new hits their ears at once: it leaned forward and clapped like it meant it.

“I was so scared… I had never played in front of 15,000 people before.”

That’s the kind of story that tells you what this series is going to be about.

A small instrument. A big life. The nerve to ask. The grace to listen. And the strange way one thread—music, in David’s case—can stitch together decades that might otherwise look like separate lives lived by different people.

The “African thumb piano” David talks about is commonly known as the mbira or kalimba—a lamellophone with metal tines you pluck with your thumbs, rooted in Southern African traditions and heard across the diaspora.

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Who is David Thiermann?

David is 80 years old, and in our first conversation, he moved from origin story to world story without ever losing the human scale.

He says he was conceived in New Jersey, born in Philadelphia, and raised in Santa Monica—ocean nearby, salt air baked into the memory. He left at 17 for University of California, Berkeley in 1963, transferred to University of California, Santa Barbara in 1965, then took a turn that feels almost impossible in today’s credential-obsessed culture: he went to Tanzania and worked in a leprosarium for three years.

There, he says, he was responsible for helping provide work and occupational therapy for about a thousand patients, and he did it by starting a business that made traditional African musical instruments, learning directly from the people around him, including members of the Nyakyusa tribe.

When he came back, University of California, Santa Cruz gave him retroactive academic credit for that fieldwork—an institutional nod to something older and wiser: lived experience counts when you can show the work.

He also describes studying musical instruments connected to Vodou ceremonies in Haiti, organizing a public health dispensary project there, and later organizing a TV series in Brazil for that country’s Ministry of Health in 1971.

And if you’re thinking, That sounds like three separate lifetimes, good. That’s exactly why it’s worth recording.

The series premise: the instrument is the through-line

Early in our talk, David said something that reads like a table of contents:

“I’m going to be telling you a lot of stories about serious trouble that I got into because of music and serious trouble that I got out of because of music.”

That’s the hook for this entire project: music as passport, music as risk, music as survival tool, music as joy.

David doesn’t describe himself as a traditional musician; he says he can “get noise out of anything,” and most of what he plays is improvisation, made on the spot.

He’s also been collecting instruments since childhood, and he traveled widely—he even says he visited every country in South America except Venezuela, chasing festivals, museums, and whatever sound might teach him something new.

When David landed somewhere and didn’t yet know the language, he carried instruments over his shoulder—thumb pianos, small flutes, harmonicas—because music could break the ice and build trust faster than vocabulary drills.

That detail matters for anyone 50+ standing at the edge of reinvention. We tend to treat “starting over” like a résumé problem. David treats it like a human-contact problem: How do you build trust in a new place? How do you show you’re safe to talk to?

Rio: when the story turns hard

Some lives have a single “big dramatic moment.” David’s life seems to have several, and one of the sharpest edges in our first conversation came from Rio de Janeiro.

He tells a story about opening his apartment door to a hallway of men with machine guns, being pushed to the floor, having his money and passport taken, and realizing—fast—that survival sometimes depends on how quickly you can read a room and keep your head from spiraling into panic.

Later, he learned the raid had connections to political turmoil and someone his roommate had sheltered. David was, in his words, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He thought about going home.

Then the thumb piano showed up again.

A person in Rio encouraged him to audition for a popular Brazilian TV program hosted by Flávio Cavalcanti.

David tried out, played the thumb piano, and says he won first place—becoming, overnight, recognizable as “the thumb piano guy,” and using the prize money to help complete his Ministry of Health TV work.

“It was quite a turnaround.”

That phrase—turnaround—is the heartbeat of Betweenward. Reinvention isn’t always a clean pivot with a neat LinkedIn headline. Sometimes it’s a crooked path where one skill becomes the rope you grab in a bad moment.

Santa Cruz: joy as a practice, not a mood

If you want to know what someone values at 80, watch what they do for people who can’t offer them status.

David told me about visiting a retirement community—Dominican Oaks—to entertain residents in their 80s.

A friend played mandolin. David decided to “play the fish”—a battery-powered singing fish he’d picked up at a flea market. He turned it on, let it flop and sing, and said some of the residents laughed so hard they nearly fell out of their chairs.

And then he said it plainly:

“I love entertaining people… it gives me a lot of joy if I can bring some joy to other people.”

That’s the line I want to carry into this series. Because the real question for encore years is less about “How do I stay busy?” than it is about “What do I do that reliably makes life better for someone else?”

A life you can map by objects

This first conversation gave us a handful of “chapter objects”—the kinds of things that can anchor memory and make a life readable:

1. The thumb piano that helped him build trust across languages and borders.

2. The guitar he bought as a teenager in Paracho, a place widely known for guitar-making and lutherie.
   He still plays that guitar today, improvising along with music through headphones as if he’s been invited into the band.

3. The hand-to-hand greeting he learned with the Nyakyusa —slow, connective, physical—touching person after person until you feel stitched back into the world by the end of the day.

I keep thinking about that greeting. It’s the opposite of how most of us move through life now: fast, untouching, half-listening. David’s stories have motion, but they also have contact.

Where this series goes next

This weekly series will work like an oral history with a beat.

Each week, I’ll ask David to pick one scene (one “frame” from his life), and we’ll build around it:

1. The moment (what happened, where, who was there).

2. The meaning (what he learned, what he believes now at 80 that he didn’t know at 20).

3. The takeaway (a practical reflection for Betweenward readers building their own “what’s next”).

Over time, the pieces will naturally organize into a book-shaped arc—childhood, leaving home, fieldwork and risk, work and identity, love and loss, humor as survival, aging and generosity. David and I aren’t shooting for a perfect legacy, rather, we are capturing a real one with the storyteller correcting us, challenge us, and laugh at our first drafts.

And if you want the honest “series thesis” in one sentence, it’s this:

A well-lived life stays playful, stays useful, and keeps one small instrument ready for the next door that might open.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

About the Author

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).