I can fly too.
Every day on the way home from picking my four year-old up from pre-school, I drive by this house with pink, plastic flamingoes perched high up in a tree. Of course, I am curious about the owner … is he gay or merely eccentric? I’ve heard that a pink flamingo in someone’s yard is code for, uh, how shall I say it? A Brokeback Mountain fan? Anyway, its none of my business what someone’s sexual orinetation is; I’m just curious about the birds.
I usually slow down and sort of crane my neck while driving by. Anybody home?! For months I saw no sign of life. Probably someone who works 9-5:00, I thought, who wouldn’t be home in the middle of the day. Actually, nobody’s home in the middle of the day anymore. When I made the decision to quit my coaching work and stay home full-time I thought I’d be spending my days outside in a neighborhood full of children - chatting and sharing the (long!) days with other moms, but stay-at-home moms don’t stay at home; they drive. And drive and drive, hither and yon! (I love that expression), to playdates, pre-school, music classes, sports activities, birthday parties, Target, Costco … anywhere but home. Neighborhoods in America become ghost towns between 9:00am & 5:00pm … and I’m scared of ghosts!
So, you can imagine my surprise when I finally DID see someone home at Flamingo House at 12:00noon on a week-day.
I saw the screen door swing open and a slender man on crutches slowly made his way to the mailbox. He was wearing a pink shirt (for real) and only had one leg. One very long, skinny leg and I thought, “Why, that’s it! That’s why he has those symbollic flamingoes up in his tree. One leg or no, they’re fixin’ to fly!!”
When I drove away I prayed, “Thank-you, God, for my two running legs.” I can fly too.
1/27/2006
roaring in the pines
1/26/2006
Not Junk
Every week or so I receive an on-line newsletter from our local (Carrboro, NC) Fleet Feet running store. I have a spam blocker/junk detector on my computer to immediately delete such bulk missives, but I decidedly mark the Fleet Feet news “Not Junk.” There’s always a gem to be found amongst the upcoming races and new shoe stock announcements. This week, a quote by spiritualist running guru (now deceased), George Sheehan, gave me pause. I also love the old-timey painting the FF owner, Bobby Biles, found. Was Norman Rockwell a runner?
Anyway, I was thinking about how corny/cheesy Old George used to seem to me. I remember meeting him once at a race in Mobile, Alabama. We were both killing time before the gun went off, me pretending to stretch … him actually doing it (because that’s what “old”people do, right?). He was talking about what a beautiful day it was for running and how much he enjoyed coming to races to meet new people, and how good the warmth of the sun felt, etc. “Uh, yeah, me too,” I said, but thought “I wonder if Lori Henes is going to show up.” There was a soft field and an easy $1,000.00 to be made.
We exchanged names and he seemed taken-aback when I didn’t know who he was. I guess he was pretty famous among the jogging set, but I was a racer. “Nope, never heard of you. Gotta go.” I had [important] strides to do before my race. I bolted away, feeling I had escaped some long-winded great uncle before he launched into yet another WWII story. I was young and fast and didn’t need his running philosphy.
Ahhh, the folly of youth! I see now that I was young and fast and foolish. Who doesn’t need to be reminded of the warmth of the sun, the beauty of the trees, the simplicity of the run ?!
I didn’t realize running was my “self-renewing compulsion;” until I was old and cheesy myself.
“There are as many reasons for running as there are days in the year, years in my life. But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child, an artist and a saint. So, too, are you. Find your own play, your own self-renewing compulsion, and you will become the person you are meant to be.”
-George Sheehan
1/24/2006
more on Saint Ralph … GO Tar Heels!
Amy’s comment has me thinking about Saint Ralph again.
When the movie ended, my first thought was, “Is this a true story?” It sure felt true throughout. I rewound to the beginning to read the disclaimer: “all the characters in this movie are fictitious and are not meant to portray actual people, etc.”
Alas, Ralph never existed in real life, nor did his bronze medalist runner turned priest/coach, nor the mystical coaching manual from which he drew. I wanted it all to be true because then I could go check Thomas Longboat’s book out of the library! [Thomas Longboat, himself, was a real-life runner - a Canadian legend.]
So, my next thought was, “who could have written such a believable story?” (and who directed the film?). I hit my “menu” button for the special features on the DVD and whose mug did I see but my own former teammate and fellow English major from UNC, Mike McGowan. I couldn’t f ‘ing believe it! We rode in the same stinky cross-country van together. He was on the team that got 5th at NCAA’s in 1985 (the one with George Nicholas that Chris Fox coached). This guy wrote and directed a movie runners will watch for years and years to come - like Chariots of Fire. Coaches will make their teams see it before the State meet. Running geeks will buy copies of it for their libraries. No wonder the scenes were so real. McGowan was a low 29’s 10k guy and a 2:18 marathoner. He was also smart, and sensitive, and hilarious, and . . . apparently . . . brilliant.
Go Tar Heels!!
p.s. if anyone knows McGowan’s e-mail address, please send it to me so I can personally (as opposed to virtually) gush.
1/22/2006
Lost and Found
A few months ago I blogged about Found Magazine. I am still fascinated with “found literature” and “found art” we can discover right under our noses in our everyday lives. In college, I had a professor of Romantic Poetry, not coincidentally, named Dr. Reed (believe me, we did some close reading of texts in his class) who encouraged us to look closely for poems all around us that the universe presented. One example I will never forget is a little, yellow, pedestrian traffic sign out in front of the post office - as you cross Franklin Street - that reads, “Walk with light.” How’s that for a found poem?!
This week the universe presented a work of art on a trail that I have run a zillion times. I “found” this amazing flower somehow imprinted, by God, in the center of a sawn tree.
Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.- David Wagoner
No two trees are the same to a Runner.
(thanks to Randy for sending me this poem)
1/21/2006
at last … something from “ask the expert”
1/20/2006
John Hinton; Beauty in Motion
For the last 7 or 8 years I have been coaching local great, John Hinton. John, whom I affectionately refer to as “Hinton-dog,” has been running so fast for so long that none of us think he will ever get old. In his prime, John qualified for 4 Olympic Trials in the 1,500m with a lifetime PR of 3:40.22; as a Masters runner, he holds the 1,500m outdoor US record in 3:49.82 and is a 2-time world masters champion. Just this past Saturday, at the UNC indoor track season opener, at the age of 43 and 3/4 (he turns 44 in May), John toed the line with a bunch of 18-20 year-old college kids in the mile … taking the lead at 800 and cruising to an easy victory in 4:22. In 2005, he opened with a 4:19 so I asked, “Are you disappointed with the time?”
“Not really; last year the Kenyans took it out fast and I had to lead today, so - no - I’m not disappointed.”
He gave me his splits, like always, but when we started to talk about next week’s work-outs I heard a slight catch in his voice - and it wasn’t coming from cell phone interference.
“What is it, John?”
“Well …” another pause, … “for the first time, ever, I felt old out there.”
“Oh?” I said. We’d always called him “the old man,” but it was a joke, you know, because he seems truly ageless … stomping all over people in The Michigan workout year in and year out, still being able to close in 43 over the last 300m.
“Yeah, they looked like high school boys, so young, and I thought, ‘What am I doing? Why am I still doing this?’” (Because you still love it, I thought).
“Does it make you want to quit?” I asked.
“No. Not yet. But I can now see why people do quit.”
I remember when it hit me - that I was too old. I was down in Charlotte in 2000, I think (John and I had traveled to the track meet together). I was lining up for the 1,500m with all these cute little girls in crop-tops and bun-huggers, with their bobbing pony-tails and their spring-break tans. At nearly 40, I had graduated to half-tights and a singlet for my racing uniform. My legs were flourescent white and I wore sunglasses not to stop the glare, but to hide my crow’s feet. I felt downright silly striding out before the gun went off. I was twice their age! I could have been their mother … yet I bolted into the lead and pounded out each 400m split (69, 2:19, 3:31), lift, lift, around the turn, drive your arms, sprint, kick, grunt, across the line for the win - 4:23.14
The bobbing little girls finished in a flurry behind me. I remember thinking, “Run away; run away.” Run away and hide how old you are. I didn’t want to talk to any of them (in my warped imagination, their voices would have squeaked). I wanted to find grown-up people to play with - to run with, to race with. My “green time” on the track was over.
I don’t know if John had as clear a vision this past Saturday when he “felt old out there,” but I do think the end is near. Soon and very soon, the amazing and inspiring Hinton-dog will hang up his track spikes forever. That will be a very sad day, indeed, for all of us old and young-timers who have been blessed, blessed, to witness his beauty in motion for, lo, these past 25 years.
1/17/2006
Ordinary Time
1/15/2006
little girl, big girl
1/13/2006
“Saint Ralph” … love and guts.
1/10/2006
Bob Schul’s gold medal run - on video, at last!
1/8/2006
“the craziness of the idle everywhere”
1/6/2006
weighing in
I saw a cairn (Wikipedia writeup) on my run this morning and, of course, I bent down to find a rock to place on it. My running partner said, “Why’d you do that?”
“It’s a tradition. Irish, I think (later, I searched to find it is Scottish). People stack rocks to make cairns as trail markers, or to honor the graves of dead, or sometimes just for artistic expression.”
“Can anyone add to it?”
“Sure. In fact, it might be back luck (or bad karma) NOT to add to it.” This, I’m still searching for … is it spiritually “rude” to pass by a cairn without weighing in?
Interestingly, as I think about adding my own “two cents” to the cairn I remember that the shape of the structure was actually a scale of sorts. One large rock, in the center, held a piece of flat-wood/bark and on each end of the wood were balanced stones. Up from the center of this structure rose the cairn on top of which I placed my rock.
I wonder … did the mountain bikers leave this found art for us to enjoy? Was it the high school XC team? The dog walkers? We all share the same trails so it is important - maybe even holy - to participate in this ancient, communal ritual.
My friend carefully positioned her stone so the delicate balance would not be altered and announced, “I’ll never run by one again without adding a rock.”
Me either.
1/4/2006
Rumblefish revisited
1/3/2006
What will you do in Canada West?
I have too too many thoughts buzzing in my brain, so I had to set up several draft folders for future blog ideas (nerds, narcissism, The Outsiders and S.E. Hinton, one-legged man at the mailbox, tammie’s summer, running with the lone wolf vs. the buffaloes, etc.). The reason I am full to bursting is that I had zero time for solitary reflection over Christmas break. As I said in an earlier post, my ideal life consists of time for the three R’s - reading, running, and ruminating. Well, when you’re a mom with three kids home from school from December 13th until this very morning, some 21 days later, you must sacrifice the third R. Maybe my brain was percolating on the back burner, like a computer in “sleep” mode, but it wasn’t until today that I was allowed to flip the full-on switch.
I could go into the gargantuan list of responsibilities that we moms (gladly?) do, but it might sound like what my old running partner used to call my “bitch of the day.” Suffice it to say, every holiday taste treat was baked; every present was purchased, assembled, wrapped, and placed under the fully decorated tree; every out-of-town gift addressed and mailed, every Christmas card sent, every song sung, every board game played, every activity planned and executed, every meal prepared and cleaned up after, every sock washed, every dream listened to each morning … Narnia- check; King Kong - check; charades, pictionary, cards (Hearts and, hey, I shot the moon!) - check, check, check!
It is a round-the-clock labor of true love. But worth it. Oh, so worth it. My eldest recorded a cd of her own fiddle playing for our Christmas present, my mushy-kisses-hating middle daughter gave me a mod-podged vase with a huge pink heart smack in the center, and my industrious youngest made her very own button flowers for the vase - colorful buttons glued on to the end of “big toothpicks” (actually, shish-kabob skewers) that she saw on ZOOM.
So, I am full of ideas and love this first free day of 2006.
When I read in Alice Munro’s short story, The View from Castle Rock, of a turn-of-the century doctor, on board a ship heading from Ireland to The Americas, asking his patient, whose baby he just delivered, “What will you do in Canada West?”, I felt a kindred shock of recognition in her reply:
“It seems to her the silliest question. She shakes her head - what can she say? She will wash and sew and cook and almost certainly suckle more children. Where that will be doesn’t much matter. It will be in a house.”
Domesticated. 
seen and known and safe
1/1/2006
All life is meant for celebration and contemplation …
This morning our priest read to us from Edward Hays’ book of Prayers for the Domestic Church. His New Year’s Blessing really resonated with me. I hope it does with you as well. Happy New Year, dear readers!
New Year’s Blessing Prayer for Clocks and Calendars
“Lord, You who live outside of time
and reside in the imperishable moment,
we ask Your blessing this new year’s day
upon Your gift to us of T I M E.Bless our clocks and watches,
You who kindly direct us
to observe the passing of minutes and hours.May they make us aware of the miracle
of each second of life we experience.May these our ticking servants
help us not to miss that which is important,
while You keep us from machine-like routine.May we ever be free from being clock watchers
and instead become time lovers.Bless our calendars,
these ordered lists of days, weeks and months,
of holidays, holydays, fasts and feasts -
all our special days of remembering.May these servants, our calendars,
once reserved for the royal few,
for Magi and pyramid priests,
now grace our homes and our lives.May they remind us of birthdays and other gift-days,
as they teach us the secret:
that all life
is meant for celebration
and contemplation.”
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