Maine Architect Scott Simons on Design Excellence and Team Building

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine. Today, I have with me a longtime friend and also a very important figure in my life, and you'll understand why in a moment. This is architect Scott Simons. Nice to see you today.

Scott Simons: Good to see you, Lisa.

Lisa Belisle: So you're important for a major reason. We are actually sitting in a studio that you created, that you designed. It's part of a house that you designed and built for yourself. It's a space that you lived in for many years before we came along and bought it and now live in, right.

Scott Simons: Well, when I pulled it in the driveway, it felt a little awkward, but then it's such a wonderful site, right on the water, and feels great to be here. It's really nice to be in this room, which was a treatment room originally, a circular room.

Lisa Belisle: So when you were designing this house, I know it was a personal project, but I know that your architecture firm also was looking a little different back then. It was basically more about Scott Simons at that point, and now it's really about the group that has become

Scott Simons: Right.

Lisa Belisle: A different entity. And you even have a new title, a new name to your group.

Scott Simons: Yes. It's not Scott Simons Architects anymore, it's Simons Architects, because we have a partnership group now, and we have a lot of people that have been in the studio for a long time that are developing new business themselves and developing different types of projects. So we really do very little residential work anymore. We do some, usually one a year, but we are involved in a lot of larger scale cultural and business projects. So the studio's changed. It's much more mature. We have a lot of senior people that have tremendous experience and tremendous technical abilities, and so we're working on much more complex buildings, and they take a lot of attention. So it's hard to shift to a residential project, although we do occasionally, especially for people that we've known for a long time. But it's much more of what we call a commercial or cultural studio now.

Lisa Belisle: The fact that we now live, me personally and my husband, in a place that you designed and created and lived in yourself, then makes it even more special since you're not doing residential work, even as a firm anymore.

Scott Simons: Yes. It's limited quantity, or something like that. There aren't too many more of these coming along.

Lisa Belisle: It's also interesting. This particular design is very interesting because it's known really by many people. There's a hill that's right by the house, as I know you well know, and many people, they bike out here, they walk out here, they walk dogs up the hill, they run out here. And anyone, if they say, oh, I love Littlejohn. Where do you live? I'll say, well, we live in the set of three houses on the hill. And they're like, oh, I know exactly where that is. And it's a very distinctive design.

Scott Simons: Yes. It's not shingle style.

Lisa Belisle: Not shingle style,

Scott Simons: No, it's quite different. It was very controversial at the time. People either loved it or hated it, and it was kind of fun. People would stop at the end of the driveway and look and just try and size it up. And I would come out and say, what do you think? And they would either say, I love it or I hate it. I didn't hear anybody say anything like, oh, it's okay. It was usually they either loved it or they hated it. It was a little controversial at the time.

Lisa Belisle: Even building on Littlejohn, anything on Littlejohn, because it's a little tiny island with little tiny lots, traditionally has been quite challenging. So I would imagine that if here you are coming along and you're gonna build on Littlejohn, and I think you're building on a site of a former camp, I believe,

Scott Simons: Right. It was

Lisa Belisle: A camp. It was a camp, and I believe you had to ask for some special considerations. So you're already starting, right out of the gate, with a few things against you, and then you create this really wonderful but striking design that's unlike anything else on the island. So I just wanna explore that mindset a little bit. Were you just feeling like, well, this is what we want and this is what we're gonna do, and we're just gonna keep pushing forward, and we respect where other people are coming from, but this is our life.

Scott Simons: Well, that question is bigger than this house. When I moved to Portland, most of the commercial buildings that were being built were red brick. I'd spent time in New York City before I came here, and there aren't any red brick buildings except the old townhouses. So I didn't have that imprint that everything had to be red brick. And so I challenged that, going way back, even before Scott Simons Architects was formed. I was like, why is everybody just automatically making the buildings red brick? So we started doing buildings with much more glass and everything, and many people were saying finally, somebody's breaking the tradition. So as a young architect in town I was willing to challenge the status quo.

And so that just played out in other projects that I did too, residential projects as well. I always was trying to see if we could do it a little differently. And I wasn't trying to be controversial per se. I was just trying to say, I'm a creative person. This is what I do. This is how I see it, and this is what I think is the right thing to do. So in this particular house, I wasn't ever trying to do a shingle style house or a house that blended in. I was trying to blend the scale and the siting of the house and all of those pieces so that it wouldn't be overwhelming. There are houses that have been built on the island here that are huge, that are like McMansions, and nobody says anything about them.

Nobody complains about them because they have shingles or they have gable roofs or something like that. But heck, if you don't do a gable roof in shingles, it's hard for people to understand. And I get that. I also feel that part of my job as a creative person is to push the limits and to educate and to do things the way I see them, reflect those in the design and in the way I approach life. Some of the spaces inside your house are quite beautiful and quite different, and then there are other rooms that are quite similar. The bedrooms are very simple, rectangular bedrooms with windows, but there are other spaces that move and flow and things like that. Inside, outside, and those are all concepts that everybody would appreciate.

Even though they might not like the roof line, they probably would like the interior layout of the rooms, because it takes advantage of the views and the orientation and the way the sun moves. And that's not just with residential projects. We do that with all projects. I see where the sun is coming from. I see where the wind is coming from. All the people in my studio and in other good studios, they all think about that. And then the form, we just let it evolve. We don't start with an idea about a form, what it's supposed to look like. We let it grow out of what we're trying to do to make the building help people do their jobs or live or whatever.

Lisa Belisle: I do remember when you and I spoke last on air, because I've interviewed you previously. I remember our conversation about the light and about how the light changes with the seasons and how that's something that even as you're designing it, you understand is still going to shift once something is built, because there's still no real way to know exactly how the sun is going to hit, but you're doing kind of your best guess. And that was such a fascinating concept for me, because it's this sense that you are actually almost creating something that is living, to co-evolve with truly things that are living on the outside, trees and grass. The sun, I don't think it's living per se, but it is part of the living environment. But I wonder how many people know that or understand that that's part of design and architecture.

Scott Simons: More than you might think. I think it's an intuitive knowing. They might not be able to articulate it. My job is to articulate it with words and with drawings, and then to build it. But I think everyone knows what it's like to sit in the sun and feel the warmth of the sun, or to watch something grow in a garden, or to see a natural material that has a clear finish, a piece of wood, or a door. The doors in your house, for example, are just beautiful. They're natural wood. I think everyone intuitively can relate to that. I'll give a recent example, much to the surprise of everyone involved in the Portland Museum of Art competition. There were over 2000 people that commented on the four different designs.

And those four designs all had very strong direction. And the attitude about natural daylight. In galleries you can't have any direct sunlight. It will destroy the paintings or the drawings or the prints or whatever. So there's a great attention to northern diffuse light and even protecting against the late afternoon sun on June 20th or something that might come in at a slight angle. There's tremendous attention paid to that. And so when those four competition entries were presented, all of the architects spoke about the light, the quality of light, and you could see them in the videos as they moved through the space. And over 2000 people wrote comments in about that. And of course they had a competition jury. And so many of them wrote about the quality of the light and how nice, and the windows, and what you could see through and all these sorts of things.

Many of them were architects, but many of them weren't architects. It's just people in the community that were reacting to the presentations. So it's a good example of how we all relate to the quality of light. And we live in a northern place, it's dark here. We're in the dark season right now. And days are short. In summer, the days are long. Nobody goes on vacation in the summer in Maine, no Mainers go on vacation. We all want to be here for that reason, to enjoy those long days.

Lisa Belisle: I think you're raising something. When I said I wonder how many people know that, I meant, I wonder how many people know that architecture takes into consideration light when engaging in the design process. But I absolutely agree with you that there is an intuitive sense. It's like watching your dog lie on the patio in the sun, or watching your cat be in the one little patch of sunlight in front of the door. We're not that different. There's something that's, we're as elemental as the dogs and the cats and all the other critters. We kind of gravitate towards that light and that warmth. And I think there is something interesting about why you're saying that. You're a designer, but you're also someone who needs to articulate something that we feel intuitively. It's like there's a translation that's occurring, and there's even, what you're telling me what I feel, is the sense that you almost need to stand your ground, because you're trying to help put forth something that's very important and that maybe other people aren't quite yet in a place to understand, because that's just not what their cognitive framework looks like at the time that you start having the conversation.

Scott Simons: Exactly. So to get back to the original question, you're right. I don't think in general people understand that that's one of the primary roles of architects, is to pay attention to those natural phenomena. And it is a part of an architect's job to communicate that and to explain that, because it is a fundamental principle. Air and sunlight are free. Bricks and mortar are expensive. So take advantage of things that don't cost you anything. Why would you not pay attention to the light? It's there. You either choose to include it or exclude it strategically. And it makes a difference in terms of the quality of space and quality of everything that happens inside.

Lisa Belisle: You were mentioning to me before we started talking on the air about this shift in your life, this new way of looking at how you approach future plans, how you approach your present situation, and the parallel with the work that you do, where at one point you were the person who was doing the design, doing that kind of showing up and taking care of the day-to-day work. And now you have a very different role. Talk to me a little bit about that. Because I can actually relate to it both personally and professionally, but I wanna hear more about it from you.

Scott Simons: Well, I have a group of architects and interns that work with me. There's 15 of us now, and our studio is incredibly busy and incredibly active and engaged in all kinds of larger scale projects than we were when I first talked to you years ago. And it's very exciting. But it's a very different studio. It's not called Scott Simons Architects anymore, it's called Simons Architects. Because I have a partnership, and I have four partners, and they're all engaged in every aspect of the business every day. I spend a lot of time working on details of the business and coaching, working with the other partners, just reviewing things. I still do initiate projects myself, and I still am involved in many projects. But the partners are very actively engaged in growing their presence and their voices and their authentic selves through the business as well.

So my role has shifted and it's been great, and I resisted it for years. I still wanted to be the guy that generated the design idea. And then I realized, well, I'm not as good at that as I was, about being fast and generating and being able to work constantly all the time. I don't have the stamina. I have a different kind of a stamina, I should say. It's not that I don't have stamina, it's that I don't have that more youthful type of stamina, which is very focused. We were talking about it earlier, that I read this thing about Bob Dylan. They asked him, when you wrote all those songs back in the sixties, where did that come from? And he said, they just came to me. I don't know where they came from.

They just came to me and I just wrote them down and I figured them out and sang them. And they said, can you do that anymore? And he said, no, I can't do that anymore, but I can do other things that I couldn't do back then. And that's how I feel now. I've sort of been trying to figure out, because a lot of architects will start to taper off at my age. I'm 68, so they will taper off and then you become a little less engaged in the work. And gradually you stop doing the work, and I actually love the work. My father worked until he was 90 and was pretty active. He worked less, but he still was very involved and it was very good for him mentally. And it was good for him to get out of the house.

He would put a tie on, go down to the office and work on a few things. And that's my model. My model is not to retire at the age of 60 or 65. I went flying right by those. I didn't even realize I was 68 until recently. It finally dawned on me that I'm in the last third, I call it the last third. But also, people say, when are you retiring? And I can't answer the question because the question seems weird to me. It seems bizarre. Like, what do you mean? Why would I stop doing something that I like to do that I'm still pretty good at? If I didn't enjoy it, if I didn't think I was adding any value, I would stop doing it. But I still feel like, especially with the maturing of the studio where there's a lot of help needed and I have a lot of experience, I can be very helpful in a lot of ways. So it's great for me, but it's a different role than when I was younger and I wanted to be the guy. Now I want to back off and let them be. I want my partners to succeed. I want to help them succeed.

Lisa Belisle: I think that that's actually a very critical thing, that it's not just each of us as individuals and our individual pieces that we bring to our personal and professional lives. It's how those pieces interact with one another and how those pieces are given the space to grow or given the time to be quiet.

Scott Simons: That's it. Exactly. I spent years trying to develop a culture of excellence, design excellence we call it, where it didn't matter what the project was, we were gonna do the best we could with what we had to work with, the budget and the client, and try and push. Going back to what I was saying earlier, I was the guy who was pushing, pushing, pushing. And we developed a culture of excellence where projects that we didn't think were maybe our best projects were getting recognized for design excellence. We've been very fortunate in that regard. The studio has been recognized over and over again for its work all across New England. And that's because we built a good culture and everybody was willing to participate in the development and the growth of that culture, so that within that, the partners and the interns and the younger architects, there's a place where they can work with other like-minded people that are all interested in doing beautiful buildings that will stand the test of time.

And they look different. The Portland Public Library doesn't look the same as the Waynflete lower school building. Doesn't look the same as the ferry terminal. Doesn't look the same as the public broadcasting building that we're gonna be building soon. And they all have a slightly different character to them that's responsive to that particular client's needs. But they all have excellence and they all have been well thought out, carefully detailed so that they will hold up and they'll stand the test of time. And that's really kind of my role now, is to remind everybody what that is. And as young people come in, to help them get used to the idea that they're part of a team. They're gonna work together and be better than they would be on their own.

Lisa Belisle: Scott, what was your father's work?

Scott Simons: He was a lawyer who became a judge in the state court system. And he ended up working in Albany and then had to retire at age 70, mandatory retirement for the state court of appeals judges. And so then with his best friends in town, he opened a law practice with them, joined their practice essentially, and was kind of of counsel and continued to do a lot because he was involved in a lot of law making for the state. He had some pretty nice consulting gigs the first 10 years after he retired, but he started working with the United Nations, which was just about 10 miles away from where he lived in Rome, New York, upstate New York, and helped them rewrite their legal system. They had a tribal council type of a system, and they had done quite well with investments and with their casinos and things like that.

And their world got more complex. They needed to have a hybrid between an American type legal system and a native type legal system. And he and another colleague of his from the court who had also retired at age 70, got together and worked for the tribe for 20 years. And they wrote this code, which has been adopted by many other native tribes in the country. So when he finally retired from that, at age 90, they treated him like an elder. The tribe was so respectful of my father. He felt like he'd kind of been kicked out of the court at age 70 because they had this mandatory retirement and they got another person coming in. It was like, what happened? And then the tribe was so appreciative of everything that he and his friend Stu had done, and they would give them these little feathers. So each feather was in recognition of five years of service to the tribe. So he ended up with four feathers, and it was one of his most prized possessions. He said that he had such a good feeling about that, and that really fed him for a long, long time.

Lisa Belisle: So in hearing what you're currently doing and what your father was doing, it seems that this role of, we'll say the final third, although the final, I guess that has a little bit of a tone to it that I don't really love, maybe one of the thirds, the next third, let's say the

Scott Simons: The next third. You never know, right?

Lisa Belisle: Right. Exactly. Maybe you'll live another third after that, and then it'll only be, you'll only be halfway through. Wouldn't that be interesting?

Scott Simons: That would be really

Lisa Belisle: Interesting. But what I wonder is, do we have enough space in our current society to allow for that? Do we actually have the ability to, I mean, you said your father was kind of kicked out of the court system, and I know when my father was in the Maine Air National Guard as a physician, he stayed on far longer than most people. And I think there was a lot of wink and nod going on, but he was still very active right up to the very end. And he never would've retired if they wouldn't have made him. And I wonder how we can encourage that. I wonder how we can continue to encourage that understanding that there is such depth and richness to a person's experience that, whatever it is that they do next, it's really a feeding forward, feeding back situation.

Scott Simons: Well, first of all, as we age, we have to claim it. So I think it works both ways. There's a little bit of an energy, almost all my friends are retired, that I went to college with, high school with, they're almost all retired and they're skiing all the time and wanting me to join them on this and that trip. And I do when I can. But I might be an exception to the rule here in terms of what my experience was with my father and what my thoughts are about what I want to do and what I'm capable of doing in the coming years. So the first thing is to not just accept the cultural norm that you retire when you want to retire. Take charge in the same way I took charge when I started the studio.

Same, started moving into commercial. I'm gonna just try and decide for myself and not have a peer group. Because to me there's a lot of peer pressure. So the first thing is for people as they age to basically rethink. Look what Matisse did when he could no longer walk and could no longer paint. He started cutting things out of paper. It was incredible what he did. Look what Picasso did. Think of all the creative people that have transitioned to a different way of expressing themselves because they can't do it. Dancers, they can't dance past quite early, but then they can become choreographers. All kinds of things. You see it all over the place in creative endeavors. And architecture is a creative, it's a business, but it's a creative business. And that's the energy, the circles that I hang around with among architects, it's all about the creative energy. And that doesn't fade. That's all still there. And the way it's applied, I think, is the key. So that's the first thing. And then culturally, learning from what my father experienced with the native tribe, there was incredible respect for what he could bring to the tribe. They didn't have that in-house, and they brought him in and over time they developed this incredible respect for each other. And so he was respected as an elder who had a unique ability to bring wisdom to the table. We see it with grandparents all the time. Young parents see the wisdom.

They thought their parents were not so bright, and then all of a sudden they have children and realize it's challenging. And the grandparents bring that wisdom. And it's that kind of simple wisdom that is relevant in the world of business and work and creativity as well. I think it's the same thing. Embrace the older people. Don't push them out. Just asking. Again, these things keep popping into my head. But Solzhenitsyn retired, he escaped and was living in Vermont, and he was interviewed as an old man, and they said, you must have a lot of people asking you to mentor them. And he said, no. And they're like, what? Nobody's asked you to review their transcript or anything like that? And he says, no.

And they said, well, are you opposed to that? And he goes, I would love to. Are you kidding me? But you have to ask. So that's part of it too. You have to ask. I think there has to be a meeting in the middle, so there would be a yes from Solzhenitsyn, if someone approached him and said, I respect your work, I would love it if you could help me figure this out. That's meeting in the middle. He wouldn't necessarily be going to them. I think you have to be willing to still offer wisdom and willing to accept wisdom on the other side.

Lisa Belisle: I like both of those ideas. The idea that you actually do have to claim the space, because I think it is very easy for people to create a mental construct around what they expect other people to be. If I'm gonna go retire and live on a golf course near Daytona, then maybe that's what everybody else should do. Because I think that offers a place of comfort, and maybe that is the right thing for one person, but not really right for another. Which is something that's also very interesting, that when we're younger, there is a sense that it's okay to be different, that it's okay to choose our own path. It's funny that we all, as we get older, we're just gonna put all the old people in one place and assume that they all do the same thing and eat the same food and act the same way.

Did we all cross a threshold and then there was a mind meld and all of a sudden our uniqueness disappeared. I mean, it's weird. I don't know how we get there, but I also think about something I read that was written about your firm and how Covid changed the way that you even work, for example, where you had a young mother with a child, and I believe somebody had gotten Covid or there was exposure to illness and various things. And you were able to work it out so that this person was able to continue to work and work from home and be able to care for their child. And I actually think that there's something structurally that we could be doing differently rather than everybody has to work 40 hours.

Everybody has to always be on site. Like, yes, let's have the bulk of people having some kind of communal space that we go to, but what about people at different stages that need to do things differently? Can we make that possible for them and not make it feel like it's infringing on other people? Because that always seems to be the pushback, is we need it to be fair for everybody. Well, what if we made a system that had a little flexibility all the way through, so that you're not feeling like if you're the one right in the middle, that you have to pick up all the slack for people on both ends that maybe aren't able to work the 40 hours on site during the hard

Scott Simons: Yes, totally agree. So many great lessons from the pandemic. First of all, almost no one in my studio works in the studio full-time. We don't expect it anymore. I fought that for the first year or two. It was like, this is crazy. How can we do these Zoom calls? Well, we actually got good at doing Zoom calls and we actually got good at being discerning about when you needed to be in the studio and when it actually worked better to work remotely. The example of the young mother is a good one. We worked through that and it worked to the benefit of everyone. It worked certainly to the benefit of her and her child and her family, but also it worked out fine for the studio. So being more flexible, one thing I experienced after about a year of the pandemic is that it was actually okay to say, I need another week to finish these drawings, or I need another week to finish this review of this document.

Whereas before it was like, pedal to the metal, everything was go, go, go. Deadlines were tight. If you missed a deadline, there was a feeling that we let somebody down. And then we became more human. We realized that there were things that were out of our control. Look at construction now. I'm renovating a house myself, and the roofer can't get there. When's he gonna get there? Well, maybe next week. They can't get the material, and I'm not angry about it, but two years ago or three years ago, I would've been, what do you mean the roofer's not coming this week? We're not gonna get the windows in. It's getting cold. But I think that was another lesson, like humanity came forward.

It's like we're all in this together. There's nothing we can do about some of these situations, so let's do the best we can. And one of them was the flexibility to work at home. And it was a big investment for all businesses to be able to duplicate. We work on large screens, we do all the drawings in Revit, we have big screens and everything. So we had to have them at home and at work. So when people were coming into the studio, they could just plug in their laptop and boom, everything would be there. Same thing at home. So there was an investment, but it actually has paid off beautifully, because I think people, certainly in my studio, and I know from other studios that I've talked to, that's been a benefit, gives greater flexibility.

Some of my team lived right in Portland. Some of them come in from Scarborough, Saco, all different places. And that's a time commitment. Yesterday, a snowy, slushy day, people are trying to figure out whether it's gonna be easy or hard to get home at the end of the day, because it wasn't snowy when they came in. So there's a lot of reasons why it's good. We used to routinely drive two, three, sometimes even four hours to a two hour meeting and come back afterwards. We would never even think of it. Now we'd be like, what, are you crazy? Let's do a Zoom meeting. We'll come up there if it's really important that we see something on the site or observe some condition, or a board meeting or something like that. But for a regular meeting that in my business is typically every couple of weeks, you have a meeting with the building committee. We can do those by Zoom, save everybody time and travel and save energy and fossil fuels. There are a million benefits.

Lisa Belisle: So one of the things that I absolutely agree with you, and in healthcare, I think it's been interesting to see, because we were doing virtual care before Covid largely, it wasn't reimbursed, which is why we didn't do a lot of it. But it really is a pretty significant, they call it a patient satisfier, which is kind of a weird term of art, but people like it, let's just say that. Now there are many people who like to come into the office, we wanna see them, and the insurance companies are like, hmm, maybe we won't pay for it as much. We're not really sure. And my thought is it's a both-and. It's the ability to offer access and have people connect where it makes sense for them. And I actually similarly think that creating culture is a both-and. I think you can still have a creative team that works well together if some part of the time they're working remotely. You just do it, as you say, you just do it differently.

Scott Simons: It's a different generation and they have different ideas about how they wanna live. My children, for example, who are in their mid thirties, when they buy Christmas gifts, this seems like a small thing, but we should all be thinking, I think I'm learning from them, they buy gifts from their friends or from local people because they wanna support their friends and their local people. They buy local beer when they're in a town, they go to the local beer that's made right there. Same thing with local produce, those kinds of things. Why aren't we all doing this? This generation, whatever their generation is, and the younger ones, they do it without thinking about it. It's exactly the right thing to do. And I think it's more our generation that buys everything on Amazon.

Maybe not, I don't know. I'm making a universal statement here, which is probably not accurate, but my experience with my children is they teach me all the time about supporting your community. So my practice is pretty much centered within the greater Portland area and Maine and northern New England. So almost everything we do is within a hundred or 200 miles of here. That's my community. I don't need to work in LA. I don't need to work in Chicago. When I was practicing in New York City, I thought, oh, we gotta grow this huge practice and everything. And I'm like, I actually wanna design buildings in my town. I wanna do buildings in Portland that I can see and that my friends can use and benefit from. I'm very proud of some of the public buildings we've done in Portland. And that's what my children say all the time, that you want to support your community. This is where you live, support where you live.

Lisa Belisle: I think my children were a little bit younger than your children, but we'll just call them roughly the same generation. And I see the same thing from them. And I think this is something that we once were doing. There once was more of this local, before we had Amazon, we went to the local bookstore, because that's what there was. Before we had cell phones, we didn't talk to people on the phone until we went home with our landline and the cord that reached into the closet while you're talking to your boyfriend, and the mom's banging on the door. So I think it's interesting that this isn't necessarily a new idea, but it's being kind of reinvigorated by a group that actually has the capacity to connect with each other in really big ways. But they're saying, no, we wanna do small ways too. And we need that kind of tangible life experience. So for me, it comes back to the both-and thing, that it is possible to perhaps touch the best aspects of the things that we have available to us now.

Scott Simons: I agree with that.

Lisa Belisle: And as I think about the Amazon thing, for me I was always a shop local person. When I went back into medicine full-time, I happened to commute to a healthcare system that's about an hour away. And now I don't have the time that I once did. And I was working through the pandemic and I was showing up in person, working through the pandemic. So I was so grateful to the people who actually, the Amazon drivers and the Amazon packers and all the people. And I would've loved to be able to do local things, but for what I needed at that time so that I could continue to show up and take care of my patients and work all the time, thank goodness we had people who were still doing those jobs. So I absolutely agree with what you're saying. And I also think it goes back to that sort of different stages of a different life, different life experiences, and how do we call the best of all the things that we have now available to us and utilize it in a way that we all feel good about.

Scott Simons: Yes, certainly my 90 year old father did not go to the store to shop for his shirts anymore. But you're right, different stages of life for sure. The mix, it's the same thing as the hybrid work situations. There's a perfect hybrid shopping combo too, for everybody. And they find their own comfort zone.

Lisa Belisle: Knowing how much I value my father, and my father, as many people who have been paying attention to the show over the last few years now know, he has cancer, but he's doing very well. I talk to him every single day on my car ride. In the morning I get a text from my mother, and in the evening I ride home from work and I talk to my father on the phone. And he was forced into a retirement. He loved being in medicine. Every single day he precepts me, every single day we talk medicine and he gives me advice and I listen and we just talk through things. And so knowing that your father has passed away, I'm sure that is a huge loss for you. And it sounds like he really was a wonderful person and you had a great relationship with him. So I'm

Scott Simons: Yes, thank

Lisa Belisle: You. I'm sending you a lot of love and healing thoughts. I don't think any of us like to think about what happens when our parents pass away. And thank goodness you had your father until he was 90,

Scott Simons: 95.

Lisa Belisle: 95.

Scott Simons: Wow.

Lisa Belisle: So you're retired for the final five years of his life.

Scott Simons: Yes, exactly.

Lisa Belisle: Wow. I guess that's, now you get to be the father. You get to be the grandfather, the one that your sons and your children look up to, and the grandchildren.

Scott Simons: Yes. It's not bad.

Lisa Belisle: Not bad. I hear that. I'm not that far behind you. So I understand it's a weird mind shift, but it's not a bad thing.

Scott Simons: No, I think it's part of life. My father passed away at home. He just stopped breathing. He was lucky in that he wasn't sick. He was confused, a little bit confused and didn't move very well, but he just stopped breathing. It was an incredible experience to be with him. And I got to see him a lot because, again, the pandemic gave me flexibility that I didn't give myself before. I could have gone to see him every two or three weeks 10 years ago, but I didn't, because we had this schedule. The pandemic freed up the schedule. I could zoom into a meeting from his house if I needed to. But I also think, going back to that idea that people took their foot off the accelerator a little bit during the pandemic to get more humanity into it.

I gave myself a lot more flexibility, which worked beautifully in terms of my father's last few years. I was able to spend a lot of time with him and say all the things that I needed to say. He said all the things to me that he needed to say. We had some really sweet conversations. He used to go to bed at like eight o'clock and then he'd come down at about nine o'clock and want his hot chocolate. So I would make him his hot chocolate and sit and talk to him on the stools in the kitchen every night that I was there. I don't know if it was, I think he did it every night, regardless of whether I was there or not.

But those times, my message to myself on that is, don't wait till you're 95, or 92, or whenever I started doing it. Don't wait for a pandemic. That's exactly the conversation we should be having with each other all the time now. Don't have to wait. I love it when I, I frequently still will stay late in the studio. It's a nice quiet time and I can get some things done. And there are others that like that little last half hour, hour too. And I'm having wonderful conversations with those members of my team that hang around a little bit longer. It quiets down, there's no phones ringing. Well, we don't use phones anymore, but you know what I mean, the energy and the activity of the day have dampened and it's a perfect time to say, how are you doing? How is that going? Just things that I was always rushing off, just no more rush.

Lisa Belisle: It's really been a pleasure to talk with you, and really it's very interesting to have talked to you during the foot on the gas stage of your life and now foot off the gas, but still heading forward in a positive direction stage of life. I really appreciate you taking the time to explore some of these ideas with me.

Scott Simons: Thanks Lisa. And thank you for sort of allowing me to talk about this. This is kind of evolving. I'm in the thick of this transition. So some of these are half formulated ideas, but I appreciate the opportunity to at least get them out there so other people may begin thinking about it, or continue thinking about it themselves.

Lisa Belisle: You are not alone in being in the thick of things. I suspect other people have very similar experiences.

Scott Simons: For sure. Yes. Thank you.

Lisa Belisle: I've been speaking with architect and friend and builder of the home in which I now live with my family and husband, architect Scott Simons. And I look forward to your maybe visiting one of these wonderful buildings that he and his firm have created around the state. And maybe perhaps Scott will come back and join me on another future episode of Radio Maine. Thanks, Scott.

Scott Simons: You're welcome.