...And Still Young

Julie and I are working on my parents’ lawn. The man from across the street asks us if we want to borrow his mower. I had not seen him in awhile. Last time he was in town, he was on leave from South Korea. He is now home from Afghanistan.

I ask him what it was like in the Demilitarized Zone. He said that the stuff going on the North Korean border is insane. It will never get reported to the UN or media, but he called them MFers a lot.
He talked about being on guard duty and playing “quick draw” with the North Koreans. Right down to aiming at each other. He said it was right out of the old west.

They threw grenades at their camp. When he got promoted, a team of North Koreans tried to kidnap him. He said that he was on a project and heard a truck pull up. Since he was pulling wire from the ceiling, he was not in the computer room where he was supposed to be. He said the door bust open and six guys with tasers and side arms came in. He said he jumped off the ladder and through an emergency exit to the street where he didn’t stop running until he got to other soldiers. He was told that they take them across the DMZ and release them in North Korea to make their way back.

He talked about the propaganda. He said that you couldn’t help but listen to it. It was in this melodic singsong voice. In the winter, he said you could hear it through the entire valley. He said it was haunting, and he still has nightmares about it. Funniest thing he said all night, “I’m at a base camp in Afghanistan, and I’m having nightmares about Korea.” He also said that the propaganda weather reports were pretty accurate.

I ask about care packages. He chuckles, saying everyone asks about the care packages. He says hygiene products are beloved. He thought it was great when he opened a package and found toothbrushes, toothpaste, or soap. He said baby wipes were ok. He said boxes would be left open and inside you find the same things. Cup of soup, powdered drink mix, and Tabasco. “Heck, the army gives us that.” Girl Scout cookies, on the other hand, are gold.

He also says that there are more playing cards in Afghanistan than in the United States. “Everyone sends playing cards. Send dominos.” No matter what, he says nothing is derided. “We know people here mean well.” He says most of his leisure time was spent watching movies. Lots of guys have laptops. And every laptop has 500 gigs of movies on them.

His official last day in the army is about a month from now. He says that they told him he was being promoted to E-6. He said he didn’t want to spend his time doing Power Points, so he declined the bonus and didn’t re-enlist. He is going back, though. He says the first contractor job he was offered was for $150K. He says he will come back as soon as he has saved a million dollars. Until then, he is waiting out his enlistment. He is eating all the fast food he can find, and drinking beer. Something he says you can’t do in Kabul.

These are big words to hear from this man. Mainly because I am not yet 40, but I once baby sit this war veteran. I was about 15, so he was about 4. Our last real conversation happened when I was home from college. He had ridden his bike to the train crossing and was telling me the difference between the train whistles for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Amtrak.

There are no bikes today. We are in his driveway sitting on the tailgate of his pickup truck. His truck has two stickers on it. One is the Parachutist Badge. The other says Afghanistan Campaign Veteran.

My dad comes over to us for a second. He hugs my father and calls him “Mr.” like he has since he could talk. My dad says, “He is taking a contract job over there. He says the office is in a Green Zone. An underground bunker with concrete walls 20 feet thick. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

As my father returns to the house, our neighbor continues. “That place is secure. But the job is 50% travel. That’s when they’re going to get you.” He points to my mother’s car in the driveway. It is a 1992 Plymouth Sundance. “The cars just like this... Pack them with 500 pounds of explosives. There isn’t much they can’t destroy.” I almost tell him about Jed’s cousin who was the machine gunner on a HumVee behind the one that got hit with the IED. I stay silent, realizing he is not the audience that would care.

He says, “I get a shiver every time I come out of the house and see that in the driveway.”

He won’t have to face that for long. He is moving in with his brother in a couple of weeks. He is going to hang around until he gets the call sometime early next year. When he came back, he rented a 30 foot dumpster. We figured they were remodeling.

“No,” he says, “I just had to throw everything away.” From attic to garage, he knew on the flight from Kandahar that the first thing he was going to do when he got home was to get rid of everything. He bought new furniture, but I don’t think it had the intended effect.

I have little input during most of the conversation. Until he asks about where Julie and I are working, I don’t have much to say at all. Soon, though, he asks me about TCU football and the Rangers playoff chances. We laugh over a story from our youths when his dad met Nolan Ryan. We talk about the other residents on the block. For awhile, things seem normal. Unfortunately, normal means that the mosquitoes do him in. “I have to get inside. These things are killing me.”

Dang mosquitoes.

Wade Old Misery Phillips

When I was in high school, I had an English class where we would compete in contests. This involved dividing the room and asking questions for points. We once named our team “The Camel No Filters,” because we were the brand of choice.
This resulted in the opposing team taking the name “Vous etes les betes stupides.” Obviously, four years of French had taught someone enough to form the sentence “You are stupid animals.” However, since our French courses were more designed to teach us how to count our change at the train station, no one could have known the French words for camel (chameau) or no filter (sans filtre). Scott, a classmate also called Ed Duke, changed our name to “Vous etes les geeks.”
Needless to say, the moniker applied to all. It was an accelerated English course for advanced placement. It was not exactly a bastion of the popular.
This class is where we read The Destructors by Graham Greene. A story which showed me that literature was like art. Sometimes I would get it. Sometimes I would not.

In The Destructors, Greene introduces us to some young teenagers who spend most of their days being good for nothing. We are introduced to four of them by name, T (Trevor), Blackie, Mike, and Summers. The remaining five to nine members are pretty interchangeable. Basically, Blackie is in charge until T shows up. T wants to step up to the next level. The idea for a day activity goes from attempting to ride buses for free to destroying a house from the inside.
The house belongs to an older gentleman with rheumatism named Thomas whose greatest fault is that he offered the boys chocolates on his way home from the store. He also made the mistake of showing the home to T when asked to see the house. This house not only survived the Blitz of London, it was built by Christopher Wren.
So while Thomas, or Old Misery as they call him, goes on holiday, the teens break in and set to what is in modern terms now called a “tear down.” Walls, floors, furniture, staircase, bathroom fixtures, bedding, all destroyed. Then, they turn on the water in the house. The last act is to tie the main support to a truck in a parking lot. When the driver of the truck accelerates, the house collapses.
The story ends with the driver releasing Thomas from the outhouse where he spent the night, courtesy of the teens and laughing at the situation.
This story pretty much ensured I would never read Graham Greene again. It is also proof that just because some committee agreed to put a story in a textbook, you don’t have to make students read garbage. I say this because we were told the theme of this story is that Destruction = Creation. A student in our class announced that he was going to slash our teacher’s tires, break all the windows, and set fire to the interior, just so he could hear our teacher say, “That Jamie is so creative.”

The Dallas Cowboys present this week’s football as literature moment with Wade Phillips playing the role of Old Misery. Wade is cast in this role instead of Jerry because I don’t find it hard to believe that in real life, Wade has offered a football player chocolates out of kindness. Jerry, on the other hand, wouldn’t do anything kind unless he could profit from it.
Playing the role of The Destructors are Keith Brooking, the Cowboys secondary, the Cowboys offense, and David Buehler.

The easiest parallel to make among the destructive is David Buehler as Mike. This is because Mike does some things to the benefit of the group. Just as Buehler executes his one trick and seems to make every tackle on the kicks run out of the end zone, Mike warns them of Thomas’s return and distracts him so he can be trapped in the lavatory. Mike also leaves on occasion, much like Buehler’s ability to make field goals.

In the story, Summers goes from distrusting Old Misery to being the first to recognize T’s leadership and joining the demolition to asking if they hadn’t already done enough. Mike Jenkins thought he had done enough as he watched Johnny Knox sprint pass him on a 3rd and 15. I have news for Mike Jenkins. When players from Abilene Christian University are leaving you in their dust, you need to seriously reevaluate your assessment of your speed. But Orlando Scandrick showed us that he isn’t even Mike Jenkins’s peer, and Mike Hamlin showed he isn’t the peer of most random NFL personnel.

And the role for leader of this debacle is a tie between Keith Brooking and the Cowboys offense. They bear this mantle due to the incredible hype and lack of any substantive return they give you. Actually, Brooking wouldn’t be that bad if he just quieted down. But if you gather a team around you and yell “The stage is set! The lights are on!” you should do something more memorable in a game than be ten yards behind Greg Olsen as he leaves your coverage for an easy touchdown.
The offense is the ultimate destruction. Three headed monsters, first round draft picks, wonderboys, a top 5 tight end, and reformed Backstreet Boy Tony Romo equal turnovers, lack of direction, and an incredible lack of clutch performances. You know what that makes? The antithesis of anything constructive. And it is not creative. It is garbage.

Jerry "Reisman" Jones

In the mid 60s, E.M. Nathanson wrote a book about misfit G.I.s in prison given a chance at freedom called Project Amnesty. The premise was that the soldiers were given the option of staying in prison to serve their sentence or going on a suicide mission. Knowing that most of the convicts had little to no aspirations to perform a sacrificial patriotic act, they were given an incentive. If they lived, they would go free. The book was called The Dirty Dozen.

The formula is pretty standard. The dozen don’t like each other. They don’t like their commander. They don’t like any other officers or military units. There is a singular moment in which they bond. They form an efficient unit. They value the mission over themselves.

At least, the sane ones do. There is a character in the book named Samson Posey who basically wears a loin cloth and paints his face in tribute to his Native American heritage on the night of the attack. Posey was a bear of a man who didn’t retaliate until poked and prodded. His crime was a single punch that killed a man. But Posey was not the problem. He was completely stable compared to Archer Maggott.

Maggott was a racist bible quoting simpleton. He demeans the minority soldiers and is way more off kilter than most.

In the middle of the mission, Maggott loses it. He endangers the mission by leaving cover before others are in place.

The Dallas Cowboys met their own Archer Maggott. His name is Alex Barron.

Alex Barron was also in a prison of sorts known as the 2005 – 2009 St. Louis Rams. The proficiency of those teams was affected in no small part by Barron’s league leading 34 false start penalties in his last four years. Barron is given a new life by being traded to Dallas, who had to be thinking they had a pretty good back up lineman. After all, Barron was a former first round pick.

In the middle of the Cowboy mission, Barron lost it. I agree that no play loses a game. So I don’t hang my hat on Barron’s holding call on the second to last play of the first half moving the ball back to set up the Tashard Choice fumble. (Nice time for your first fumble in three years, Tashard.)
I can’t even show the last play and Barron’s horrible technique resulting in a penalty that wiped out the game winning touchdown.

But I can point to Barron’s incompetence throughout the entire game preventing the Dallas offense from functioning normally. We saw the off balance line more than ever and Jason Witten in the backfield to block instead of splitting the seams.

Was it Posey’s fault that he was put with a group in which he didn’t belong, knowing he could snap?
Is it Barron’s fault he is put in a position to fail, knowing he would fail? Washington coordinator Jim Haslett told his team that they would get Barron to commit penalties. This was a known known.

And that is the fault of the leadership that put Maggot and Barron in positions to cause harm.

If You've Seen One...

I had never been to Pittsburgh. And I didn’t begin my visit with a negative opinion of the city. I dislike the Steelers, but had no opinion of the town. Besides that, I liked the Pirates and the Penguins and Phish, if there is any correlation to the Dr. J movie.

The reason for our trip was to attend the engagement festivities for Julie’s cousin. This would complete a circle of sorts as I met this cousin and her fiancé at our formal engagement party three years ago. I remember him best for introducing me to room temperature Dr. Pepper. I thought he was a bit touched. As someone who doesn’t imbibe alcohol, one of my complaints about Europe was their apparent ice shortage. Any drink order that required ice consisted of a singular cube usually the size of a peanut M&M.

I was converted easily. There was nothing wrong with room temperature Dr. Pepper. It was smooth, mellow, even. I brought this up the next week during lunch with a co-worker. This guy knows a lot about a lot. If I had to play a game of trivial pursuit with my house at stake, he would be my partner. (Julie would want him to be my partner, too.) He tells me that he remembers advertisements where people drank Dr. Pepper hot, like tea or coffee. I haven’t tried that, but I vouch for the other.
So, our first full day in Pittsburgh was a Friday spent walking through downtown. Lots of construction going on, which I wasn’t expecting. Count me among those that thought of a coal town that was not exactly prospering. This is where Pittsburgh got me. Sure, the roots are in coal, but this Carnegie Mellon’s town, too. And the Heinz family.

This was a big topic that night for me. Julie’s family has always been accommodating, but the best discourse came from her cousin Neil. Neil is still in college, in another state. He wasn’t supposed to be there because he was supposed to be in a wedding the next day, in yet another state. He was taking a pass because he was ill. Other wedding invitees had dropped him off on the way to the wedding, leaving him to find a way back to school by Monday. Talking with him, you knew that it really wasn’t an issue, somehow it would happen.

Neil explained that he had fielded his share of phone calls from friends asking how to get somewhere at all hours of the day. “Pittsburgh is weird. How many other cities have 2nd and 3rd street running parallel in opposite directions, then two blocks later, they cross each other?”

Because Neil wasn’t feeling well, he didn’t take part in the Heinz Field tour or the Pirates game on Saturday night. This game was part of the 50th anniversary of the 1960 World Series team. The video of Bill Mazeroski’s homerun was shown many times. What I did not know was that Julie’s uncle attended that game. His father had taken him out of school to see an historic event. Pretty great, huh?
Well it turns out, his sister was there, too. Prior to this, this aunt of Julie’s was best known to me with this note: she had been to six continents, and Antarctica was one of them.

Apparently, in 1960 the Pirates allowed Carnegie Mellon students to enter the stadium after the 7th inning. I had heard of this before. The Rangers did this throughout the 80s. Then again, there was not a long line taking advantage of this offer. Julie’s aunt walked over with her art school friends who thought it would be a good opportunity to draw faces and crowd scenes. So she was also there when the Pirates won it all.

Here is the kicker. To this day, it is the only major league baseball game she has ever attended.

Carrots are Divine

When McVey and I first lived together, it was as freshmen in a college dorm. Other than sharing a room with a brother nine years older than me for a short time, I had not occupied a bedroom with someone else for an extended period of time.

One of the great things about our living situation was that McVey’s dad was a technophile. He had the newest of everything as soon as it rolled off the assembly line. And whenever he bought a new toy, he gave his “old” equipment to his son. As a result, we had a receiver, tape deck, and speakers that were on par with just about anyone in Jester East.

The cd player, however, was mine. For some unknown reason, my parents had given me a Pioneer 6 cd changer for a Christmas present. I was never into purchasing music. I was one of those guys that recorded songs from the radio on to cassette. At the end of college, I still did not own enough cds to fill the 6 cd changer. I ended up trading it for a Tandy 386.

Every night, we would decide which cds to load, put it on random, and retire to our single beds that were about three feet away from each other. Inevitably, we would talk about some topic until sleep overtook us. I would like to say these were noble, soul searching topics. However, one night we were talking about the misanthrope that is Scrappy Doo. At some point, McVey uttered the phrase, “Scooby Doo was the most predictable cartoon ever.”

This is how we learned that our next door dorm mates eavesdropped on us outside our door. We heard raucous laughter, followed by the sound of a door slamming, and through the wall heard someone chortle, “Mother____ers talking about Scooby Doo.”

If I get around to it, I will write more about Royce and Big Joe, including their suggestion on how to obtain fake IDs and the time one of them confronted McVey in the hallway... while naked.

In any event, I wrote that story to set up the fact that I can talk about cartoons. I watched plenty growing up. You can figure the era. Saturday mornings with the Super Friends, Laff-A-Lympics, Underdog, Quick Draw McGraw, Yogi Bear. After school watching went from Mighty Mouse, Felix the Cat, and the Banana Splits Offerings of Wacky Races and The Adventures of Gulliver to the then cutting edge animation of Battle of the Planets and Star Blazers.

But nothing topped Saturday morning and 90 minutes of Warner Brothers / Merry Melodies. By the time I got to high school, the show was an hour long. When I came home from college it was a half hour. By the mid 90s, it was gone, replaced by Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

So, when Julie told me we were going to Pittsburg to her cousin Maggie’s wedding shower, I immediately thought, “There’s a cartoon museum in Pittsburg.” We went to the Toonseum our first day there and it was worth the trip. It is not huge, and while we were there was not exactly a huge permanent exhibit to write about. Disney drawing desk, check. Original sketches of Toucan Sam and Dennis the Menace, check. Wonderfully knowledgeable curator, double check.

But if you haven’t seen the Art of Akira exhibit, you are missing out. I don’t think that large scale cooperation and dedication to drawing can be put together again. The story of Akira’s creation as a movie, the effort put into the work, and the far reaching effects alone made the visit a delight.

But standing there, and seeing the craftsmanship of the cells, made me enjoy the movie so much more. There are layers and layers of artists’ visions that deserve appreciation. I was amazed we spent so much time in a not large space. When we started the tour, they had us watch a YouTube video about the exhibit. It was a mood setter. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBAJdtPVnZc)

And there is a decent selection of books at the Toonseum. If you haven’t checked out Ho Che Anderson’s King or Blegvad’s Leviathan, they have it for you.

There Are Some Who Call Me...

So we decided to be a two pet household. I don't think that is something we put on any census form, but it was a consideration for the first pet. We have known that Annie does not play well with others. It is partly because she is a mix between the most paranoid / break glass in the event of anything that might remotely resemble an emergency dog breed and the slightly off kilter canine version of Vietnam era tunnel rats.

We decided to go with a cat. We went to adopt one from a local PetSmart. We saw a neat black and white cat named Moo-Moo, but we were told that to adopt him, we had to wait until a Saturday for the adoption team. We learned that another store could do direct adoptions, so we went there instead.
Sure enough, there were two orange cats. One of them named Max was 10 years old and declawed. We were pulled to Max because he had quite the sob story.
The other orange had white markings and was five months old.

We called Max's foster family to ask some key questions about his behavior. In a stroke of luck, the foster was a former coworker of ours. She told us that she knew Julie and me and knew enough about Annie that Max would not be a good fit. That led us to the orange and white, named Ivy.

We both knew a name change was in order. Ivy wasn't going to work. Maybe a couple of years ago, Ivy would have made me think of Posion Ivy, nemesis of Batman. Now, it makes me think of the itchy rash on my arms and the biopsy done by my dermatologist that redefined ‘spongiform.’

Julie’s first recommendation for a name was Groucho. This was a nod both to the cat’s temperament and her wild hair. But the masculine name didn’t seem quite right. Since her willingness to be held was predicated on giving her kitten treats, the next name suggested was Miss Piggy. This didn’t seem to be flattering at all, so we started thinking on a broader scale.

How could we incorporate Annie into the picture? Well, for awhile after we rescued Annie, we called her Little Orphan Annie. We thought about Daddy Warbucks. Or Mommy Warbucks. My only request was that the name be Daddy (or Mommy) War Bucks. That way, I could say the cat’s middle name was War. This would make Annie a dog of war, right?

Well, that didn’t work out.

The next two names came from our fandom of artists we see live every chance we get. Name #6 was Pearl. This was a nod to Amanda Shires, fiddle player extraordinaire. But the orange and white didn’t fit our cat. So what about Neko?

Now we were on to something. We love Neko Case. I am pretty confident that I have seen Neko every time she has been through DFW, including that appearance with A Fine Frenzy and Rufus Wainwright and her first appearance at Sons of Hermann Hall. Our friend Julian told us that Neko meant ‘cat’ in Japanese. Perfect!

But then we found out what the Japanese slang for Neko meant. Now, we don’t hang out with a hipster Japanese crowd. We have seen Lost in Translation and want to visit Shinto temples and experience the new jazz scene in Tokyo, but we don’t get to interact everyday with cool kids from Kyoto. Still the possibility of eliciting giggles at our cat’s name was enough for us to strike that choice from the list.


Choice #8 was… Groucho. I don’t think this was so much a surrender to the unexpected difficulty of naming a cat. I think this was more a reference to her interaction with Annie.

Choice #9 was also a repeat. We were back to Miss Piggy. Julie even found out that Miss Piggy’s real name is Pigathius Lee. Still, what a mark to put upon our new cat’s forehead! Piggy?
But it did fit. So maybe we needed to stick with this reference. Option #10: Olivia. A pig from children’s literature. Heck, I can’t write a children’s story, but we could name our cat after a character. How about a derivative? Option #11: Olive. This was Popeye’s love interest. We could work with this. And we thought we had it.

Until a moment of genius, that is. The Aran Islands. Just off the coast of Ireland. Inisheer. Inishmore. Inishmaan. Aran! What a great name. We tried it. It fit. We felt pretty comfortable with it.
Then our friend Jed crushed our positivity, as he is wont to do. He told us that Aran sounded too much like Aryan. Knowing that we are sensitive to avoiding any misrepresentation on this subject, he successfully needled us into abandoning name #12.

So we moved to the east a little. Back to the mainland of Ireland. The town of Doolin rests in County Clare. County Clare is a welcoming and peaceful area in a country that holds many good memories for both us and our families. Lucky #13: Clare.

Jourangadons

I am glad that McVey has been introduced so early in these blog posts. This befits someone that told me I needed to read to Catcher in the Rye. You would think that he made the suggestion during our junior year of highschool, but it didn't happen that way. I didn't read it until about two years after college. How do you get a liberal arts degree without reading Catcher in the Rye? McVey also got me into writing. My first efforts at short stories and a screenplay were all read by him first.

Also, McVey was blogging before it was cool. Unlike my current efforts at blogging many years after blogging became popular. In the days of geocities web sites, McVey introduced the net to Walton Walker's Shoebox. The idea was based upon a basement apartment he lived in around the turn of the millenium. This place was a typical apartment, except for the fact that I would not have even been able to sleep there. One of the doors in his bedroom led to nowhere.

Check that, nowhere would have been preferable. As it was, one of his doors opened to this large open area that was basically a crawlspace. Except that most crawlspaces have a clearance of about 2 and a half feet. This crawlspace was about six feet tall. So imagine a 500 square foot crawl space with mounds of dirt about five feet tall preventing you from seeing more than two or three feet ahead of you except for the ground floor window entry you could see about 75 feet away.

Somewhere in this underworld that was also his water heater closet, McVey concocted a shoebox which contained the greatest memories and stories of Walton Walker. This was not the general in the Patton's Third Army who couldn't find a way across a river and namesake of a Dallas thruway, but a slacker turned young executive that had lived there before he did. They were basically blog posts. Stories about concerts, work, and the like filled his web page.

Around this time, he wrote one of the best children's stories I have ever read. It was about a jourangadong that lived in the forest outside of a town filled with characters. I find writing for children very difficult. This does not come as a surprise to those that know me well, because I have great difficulty communicating with children on any level, much less the written word. I tried. I read all of Daniel Pinkwater's stuff I could get my hands on. It makes sense that his work I enjoyed most consisted of essays he did for Smithsonian magazine.

I have always seen this as my next challenge. Can I write a good children's story? Unfortunately, there are about a dozen other types of writing and subjects that get in the way. Someday, though, my first effort will be on these pages.

Laughter at Wilson's Creek

That last post reminds me that I have had problems keeping up with walkers before. In the late 90s, my roommate McVey and I decided to go on a one day road trip with our best friend, Gruve. This trip started at midnight after McVey closed out for the night in downtown Fort Worth. Gruve and I were waiting in my 1990 Chrysler LeBaron for a drive of almost eight hours to a national park outside of Springfield, Missouri.

See, by this time, we had watched the Ken Burns documentary on The Civil War, read Shelby Foote’s trilogy, and watched Glory and Gettysburg a few times over. Already a guy who originally intended to major in history, it didn’t take much of a suggestion from Gruve to put these wheels in motion. And our wheels were pulling up to Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield right around the time they opened the gates.

We started at the visitor’s center and decided to take the self guided tour. You know the type. You drive to a numbered station, park the car, walk down a marked path, read some signs explaining what happened, then return to the car, drive to the next station, and repeat. We did this a couple of times until we were at a station on the opposite side of the park from the visitor center. The weather was great. It was still early, and the sun was burning off the morning mist. We were the only three people out there.

We set out from the car and walked down a well worn trail. It branched off, and we stuck with the one heading into the interior of the battlefield.

It would be some time before we realized that the folks at Wilson’s Creek had a unique sense of humor.
So unique, there is an unmarked part of the trail that intersects with a horse path. As if to show the genius of their comedy styling, the designers of the park have the horse trail run asymptotically closely to the rest of the footpath. So closely, that we did not realize the numerator was getting much larger than the denominator. By the time we did realize that we were walking away from where we were supposed to be, it was because we heard cars through the trees and could tell we were approaching the road.

Performing what could best be described as very sketchy triangulation, we figured we should just get back to road and walk to the car. This was our second mistake. Apparently, like a mathematical phantom of the opera, the planners for this battlefield tour had configured a double asymptote. The more we walked, the further we moved from the road into the middle of the battlefield. By the time we realized that we had placed ourselves in the least convenient location, we were not near a road or the foot trail.

What was visible to us, though, was another set of markers at the top of a nearby hill. Now we had a plan. We would take this hill, follow the footpath back to the road, and walk back to the car. No paths were necessary, we could at least tell which way was up. That was the direction we would go. Now walking through brush, I noticed that I was moving with more difficulty than McVey or Gruve. Gruve, being an unstoppable machine, was moving up the hill like a Roomba vacuum cleaner, kind of meandering, but moving forward, making odd sounds, and leaving a clean path in his wake.

McVey and I were on a different path. When I brought up the amount of exertion I was facing on this hill, he was very dismissive. “We’re both going the same distance.”

I pointed out that he was over six feet, two inches tall. He covered more ground than I did. He was even more dismissive. “Yeah, but they’ve done studies that shorter people just take two shorter steps twice as fast to keep pace.”

This was the story I recounted for Julie on our 5K a couple of weekends ago. And just so we don’t pin this on McVey, she had heard the same studies. The studies that basically say, “Short people perform twice the locomotive processes as tall people to cover the same distance. So what’s the big deal?

Back on our hill, I was riled enough by this to double my efforts. After all, I was training for the fireman exam and could run a mile and a half in under 12 minutes. Even though we had already walked for almost 45 minutes, this would be no big deal.

If you ever want proof that some people are just genetically predisposed to some things, I offer this as my shining example. As we approached the battlefield markers, I was redefining perspiration and sucking wind. Meanwhile, my roommate, who was almost smoking a pack a day, jogged backwards up the hill faster than I could double time forwards.

The good news is that the path from these markers eventually connected to the road. The bad news was that we were two stops away from where we parked. None of us had slept on the drive up, and we were approaching exhaustion after almost an hour and a half of hiking with no water. As a result, the walk on the road seemed interminable. What happened next is the one thing my friends remember from this day.

As delirium was setting in, we were laughing at everything that was said, seen, or heard. For one of only two times in my life, someone said something so funny, it caused me to laugh hard enough that the neural communicators emitting from the brain telling your legs to hold you upright just stopped.

I will credit McVey for saying, “We have walked so far, we are going to run into ourselves walking the opposite direction.” (Actually, my memory recalls that it might have been Gruve. Unfortunately, my judgment might be influenced by Dave, who once claimed that Gruve took all of his stories and just added sound effects.)

There was a split second between the time I heard these words and I was on my side in a quasi fetal position doing something between guffawing and chortling. To this day, that has only occurred one other time. Those words were also delivered by McVey in the city of Verona. I’m pretty sure that is an entire blog entry unto itself.

The Coldness of the Short Distance Runner

Last weekend, my wife and I completed a marathon event. Not an actual 26.2 mile marathon, but for us 3.1 miles counts as a marathon-type event. We were part of a group ramping up to a participate in a 10K with Team in Training, a fund raising group with the cause of finding a cure for Leukemia / Lymphoma / other blood disorders. The other members of our group are all former Olympians, members of school cross country teams, and lifelong joggers. At least that is what seems to be the case.

On an average Saturday morning over the last month, we meet with anywhere from fifteen to twenty other teammates along the Trinity trail. When we complete walking our two or three miles, most of our team is already back in their homes or eating breakfast. This is because they sprint with a speed that makes me think they are the infected from 28 Days Later. This is quite the humbling experience because our path takes us to a turnaround point and return to the start. The entire team passes us on their way to completion, usually within site of the table where we drop off our car keys when we begin.

As one of our tests, we have to take part in a 5K close to Benbrook Lake. I don’t think we foresaw what weather in early February would be like, but 28 degrees was a bit much. We had never participated in an organized run like this. There were not a lot of people there, but those that were seemed to be way too enthusiastic. While we were glad that it was socially acceptable for us to hug each other for conserving heat, there were some around us running practice 5Ks to stay warm.

As the time approached, we gathered near the starting line and a voice instructed runners to follow one of two paths, 5K to the left, half marathon to the right. There was also a warning that to the left, near the turnaround point, there was ice on the trail. There would be boy scouts warning as you approached the area. At the start, there was a quick separation between walkers and runners. There was also a quick separation between walkers and us. Before turning the first curve, we were walking dead last behind a family that we swore was just out for a daily walk and not part of the 5K at all.

We thought we had walked a decent distance before arriving at the split for the 5K and half marathon. Keeping to the left, there was a slight rise until a table manned by boy scouts passing out water. We were the last ones to the water station and finally saw Benbrook Lake. We were just at this point when the first runners were already coming back, including our coach. As we continued walking we saw more of the team, but also became aware of the sound of someone behind us. Apparently, someone that started the race late was also walking, and gaining ground quickly. We attempted to increase our pace when we got to the ice patch. Here, your options were to either walk on ice or step off the trail into a deep drop off of slush hidden by trampled down grass. We made the wrong choice. Just beyond it was our turnaround.

At this point, we were feeling ok. Ok enough that we decided to jog after we crossed the ice on the path. After all, we were halfway done, right? We jogged until we passed the walker ahead of us. We then resumed walking, then jogged again, and walked until we got back to the water station. This made sense. We weren’t last. We were close, but not last. Surely that was a testament to our walking two miles every other day. As we approached the split where we moved away from the half marathoners, we could hear the announcements from the starting / finish line. Except we weren’t being guided towards the finish line.

The walkers ahead of us were heading towards where the half marathoners had gone. The arrows for the 5K also pointed that way. It turns out that the reason they did not warn that there was ice near the halfway point was because the turnaround was at the one-third point. This had a serious effect on our mood. Instead of being almost finished and jogging a bit, we were one-half done, just about spent, freezing, with wet feet. It didn’t get any better. It turns out that the water station at the one-sixth point was the only one available. The rest of the walk was spent commenting on the fact that the woman ahead of us didn’t walk all the way to the second turnaround.

Thanks to the kids that thought they would rather see how much ice they could break by one of the pavilions, their parents that waited for them, the pregnant woman we passed by jogging, and the woman that started about ten minutes later than we did, we did not finish last. The only members of our team still around were waiting for the half marathoner still on the course. We stopped by the snack stand that was passing out cookies, pretzels, and hot chocolate to participants. Know the last thing I want after doing a 5K? Cheese nachos covered in chili. Instead, we grabbed some snickerdoodles and headed for the car.