“In a booth on a dock there worked a Cowboy. Not a nasty, wet booth exposed to the elements, nor a cramped, narrow booth with nowhere to sit. It was the Cowboy’s booth, and that meant comfort.”

There’s good reason for my year end review of 2025 to begin with a paraphrase of the famous opening paragraph of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Much as Bilbo in that story was called quite suddenly to leave the comfort of his hobbit hole and journey off on an adventure that would change the course of his life forever, so too was I called quite suddenly to journey off on an adventure. 2025 will always be the year that unexpectedly I quit my job in the oil industry and the start of my ensuing adventures. Many other things happened this year along the way, but they are all preface, prologue, footnotes, side stories, and epilogues to the true tale. 

On the morning of July 19^th I awoke as usual, not feeling particularly productive. From force of habit I mossied on over to my computer, not even knowing if I wanted to play games or put on some YouTube videos. And yet as soon as I sat down I suddenly found the focus, energy, and determination to get something, anything, accomplished. It was rather uncharacteristic, and I know not where the nudge came from. So I did some sleuthing to see if a Master’s of Tolkien Studies was even a thing that existed. In under an hour I had received my college transcripts and sent out my application for grad school. 

But still feeling productive, I also applied for a job I had heard was hiring some weeks before, but hadn’t given any serious consideration. I had a comfortable career in the oil industry, was making decent money for light work and plenty of time off, and went into the year still planning on staying in oil till retirement. This application also asked for my transcripts, which I conventionally got just minutes before. 

I sent out the application thinking nothing would come of it. It was in an entirely different field in which I had no experience, and it demanded a level of physicality which made me, pushing nearly forty, hardly the ideal candidate. I must’ve seemed as ill-suited as round-bellied Bilbo Baggins had in the eyes of the Dwarves. 

But like Bilbo, a desire for adventure had begun to stir in me – in no small part to the tales of Tolkien himself. I had recently finished my first draft of an academic paper which was since accepted for publication in Mallorn, the journal of Tolkien studies, and mere days earlier I had an article accepted by Amon Hen, the bi-monthly magazine of the Tolkien Society. At the same time I was participating in a Lord of the Rings Bible study at a Catholic church, inspiring a full reread. I’ve always been immersed in Tolkien’s writings, but for some reason their effect upon me had begun to change.

I no longer desired merely to be a loremaster with scholarly knowledge of the subject; I wanted to better emulate the heroes of the stories – men of service to orders dedicated to justice and protection of one’s people. Aragorn served as a Dúnadan Ranger; Faramir as one in Ithilien; Merry as a Rider of Rohan, Esquire to the King; Pippen as a Knight of Gondor in service to the Steward. 

My call to adventure had come quickly after; surprisingly soon, to be sure. Within a few weeks I was being drug tested, my physical conditioning evaluated, and offering references for a background investigation. It was all so sudden that I thought it must surely be but the beginning of the hiring process, and thus I had not yet begun to give real consideration to what I would do if I were offered the job – it still seemed like a fantasy, and reality had not yet hit. 

Thrice before I had received similar calls to adventure, and thrice before I had elected instead for the comfortable life I had come to know. Out of high school I could have gotten into any military academy of my choosing, especially through my years with the Sea Cadets, but chose instead to attend a small Christian college that didn’t even have an ROTC. When I dropped out of seminary I scored nearly perfect on the Navy’s officer aptitude test, but I did so soon after the start of the Great Recession, and it was three years before I was finally offered a chance at a commission, at which time I was just settling into my job in the oil industry. And when it appeared that I would lose my job at Hess, the company being sold while I was the most recent hire, I took the test for the NYPD; by the time New York’s Finest offered me a job, I had already got hired by the company which bought Hess out, and made the mistake of rejecting the call again. And as the years passed and I began to age it began to dawn on me I’d missed my opportunity to ever do anything of the kind at my age, I grew to deeply regret what might have been. 

One Thursday at the start of September I was sent some more forms to fill out and told to schedule an appointment for fingerprinting, which I made for Monday morning before my next shift at the oil terminal. That Sunday afternoon I was told via email to instead go to the city, and to wear a suit and tie. I brought with me everything I would need for my night shift at the terminal, which I was hoping I wouldn’t be late for, not knowing how long the interview or whatnot would take, or what traffic would be like afterwards.

When I reported in it quickly became clear that I and the others present had gotten the job. As we were engaged in the minutiae of administrative miscellanea, I asked the obvious question: “What is our actual start date, and when should we give our two weeks notice at our old jobs?” The response was unexpected, to say the least: “Today is your first day. We need you here in the city every day at 8 AM sharp from now on. Quit your old job right now.” 

It was like Gandalf telling Bilbo the morning after his Unexpected Party that he needed to sprint a mile to be at the Green Dragon Inn in ten minutes if he intended to set out with Thorin & Co.  – the idle fancies imagined the night before while listening to the Dwarves sing “Over the Misty Mountains Cold” suddenly demanded an immediate commitment with no hesitation whatsoever.

So I quit my job in oil then and there. I sent a text explaining the situation, and that was that. It came as a shock to my old coworkers. Thursday I was there, with no indications whatsoever that it was my last day. I was working atop the butane cars, the worst task there, and even learning a bit about the lineup – not the actions of someone with one foot out the door. Had I myself known it’d be my last day, I might’ve been tempted to lighten my workload. 

But the call to adventure was not merely a metaphor. That first day at the new job I was told that I’d be imminently sent for several weeks halfway across the country to train. And be tested. And if I was found wanting and failed, I would be fired from the new job which I had just quit my old one to accept. Nor was such an idle threat; fewer than half of us who started the training made it to the end. It was a genuine rite of passage.

But I did not just barely squeak by, like Bilbo squeezing through the goblins’ back door. Academically and physically I excelled, and not merely in light of my advanced age (being the oldest by multiple years). And having journeyed “there and back again,” I did not return the same man (or hobbit) who had set out. 

Quitting my comfortable life to accept the call to adventure was not the right decision, but only because it was not a decision at all, at least not one I consciously considered and deliberated; it was made in the moment, in an instant. Like Bilbo by the time he faced the spiders of Mirkwood, I’ve begun to trust my luck (if luck you call it ), and that luck has been fortunate thus far. 

Were this annual “The Year That Was…” series a private journal instead of a public memoir, I’d hazard to divulge more. It might be a disservice to my future biographers, but even  Bilbo’s personal diary became the much copied and circulated Red Book of Westmarch, and secrets such as the true ending to the riddle game with Gollum were laid bare. 

So instead I’ll end here with one final comparison to Bilbo, not in The Hobbit, but rather the opening chapter of Lord of the Rings. My whole Shire is currently abuzz with anticipation of a Long Expected Party, my fortieth birthday, which promises to be an occasion of special magnificence. It’s not quite yet my eleventy-first, and I won’t even have two score of attendees, let alone a gross, but it will be, in the words of Bilbo, “a night to remember”.