Every day on our way in to town this past summer, my husband and I drove by a guy who appeared to be perpetually playing cornhole. There he was, just outside his garage (or inside, if it was raining), robotically tossing a little beanbag toward a hole in a flat board. Perhaps he was in training for some sort of high-level competition, we mused, though he was approaching middle age, was a little underfed, and didn’t look the part of an athlete. Still, his persistence was impressive.

We never slowed long enough to see if the bag made it into the hole, but this little scenario fascinated us. I don’t know if it was his dedication to a sport so unassuming, so equipment-light, so seemingly artless, that piqued our interest, or the fact that he toiled alone, outside the watchful eyes of fandom, no crowd to either cheer him on or bemoan his losses.

Clearly we felt Cornhole Guy had to have some larger purpose, some lofty goal, to justify his intense dedication and focus. But now I’m thinking maybe he just enjoyed it. Maybe there was some hypnotic satisfaction in the tossing of a beanbag that those of us who have never tossed one cannot fathom, and that was enough for him.

I’m reminded of the story of my first house, which, legend has it, was built by a one-armed man. I eventually published an essay about the house (and the man, who I never met) in Oxford American, but it took me five years of writing and rewriting to figure out what it was that fascinated me about his remarkable construction feat beyond the fact that he accomplished it with only one arm.

I finally decided it was his commitment to creating exactly what he needed in the house (he lived in it for many years before I bought it) and nothing more: there was a tiny kitchen with five cabinets, one microscopically small bathroom, and, to my husband’s consternation, no moldings. The house was, I speculated, the one-armed man’s nod to simplicity, a nose-thumbing at a society he believed was powered (and corrupted) by rampant materialism.

Possibly I was projecting, and this snarky smackdown of a materialistic world was truer of my feelings than the one-armed man’s. Probably he built small for no other reason than that he only had one arm, and it was too hard to build large. But the anti-materialism argument was more profound, and the essay was published half a decade after I originally conceived of it. Thus did the one-armed man, whoever he was, go down in the annals of literature and my own mind as a guy who lived a modest and unassuming life, a guy who knew exactly what he needed to be satisfied, and wanted for nothing more. I should be so humble.

My husband and I haven’t seen Cornhole Guy since mid-summer. This, of course, has fueled more speculation on our part. Did he lose the high-level cornhole competition for which he was obsessively training, and throw in the towel? Or maybe he won it, and now he’s checked “win cornhole competition” off his bucket list and there’s no reason to keep practicing. How great that would be, like snatching the best apple from the tallest tree and never needing to eat an apple again.  

Or maybe playing cornhole served a deeper purpose. Maybe his life was in shambles, and this simple, repetitive game offered some stability. Or maybe he worked out complex algorithms in his brain while mindlessly tossing a bag at a hole, and now that they’re solved, there’s no need for games.

Or maybe, like the one-armed man who built a small house, Cornhole Guy was just doing what came naturally—perfecting a skill the world would likely never know about—with no intention of becoming a blank slate for the projections of people like my husband and me, for whom the simplest truths (it’s possible to just have fun for fun; if you only have one arm, build a smaller house), profound as they are, go unnoticed.

Thanks to Cornhole Guy and my resurfaced memory of the one-armed man, I’m trying to pay more attention to the everyday things, the small things that are, in fact, not small at all. With my birthday last month, and with the downturn in my mother’s health, I find myself seeking comfort in the reliability of friendships, the constancy of my marriage, the easy adoration of my dogs, and the gift of still having a mom, of being able to talk her through what day it is, where she lives, what she still knows.

It might look like tossing beanbags at a hole. But the stakes feel incredibly high. 

Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist and Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. More at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].