The Warrior and The Artist

You should return. If the Great Gatsby, the mainstay of high school English, laments “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” then you should let yourself drift back to that tide, back to that familiar time when you read about Gatsby and Daisy’s struggle, back to that contradictory place of a southern California board school, a place that had dormitory prefects who could take surfing as a sport, a place where studying for AP biology was done poolside under a gentle Santa Barbara sun, and a place that had classes on Saturdays but a week off to hike to the Kern River or camp in the Yosemite valley. Two of your favorite teachers, Mr. and Mrs. Sykes, are retiring and one of better things you can do is go back for their tribute weekend on March 25. You should return.

Just over twenty years ago we arrived at boarding school awkward, uncertain, and I was surprised why I was given the head of the arts program as an advisor. My strengths were math and science, and while I like to think I am creative, my coloring books growing up were always colored outside the boxes not so much because I was trying to channel Pollock, but because I lacked the coordination to be gentle. If Mrs. Sykes was ever assigned a less artistic advisee, she was very polite in her constant British charm never to share.

And she is an artist always – an artist when she dressed so stylishly in Santa Fe style outfits that seemed to flow everywhere matching her enthusiasm, an artist who went all out for Halloweens or Fair costumes, and artist who at least appreciated the creativity when she busted Carter Kirkwood and me for pumping music through the dorms’ PA system. She is also a great teacher, the patient kind, who would introduce chiaroscuro and composition to my world in Foundation Arts and provide sympathy to attempts at pottery when the bowls came out suitable only for ashtrays in an increasingly nonsmoking California. I learned about complementary colors – how red clashes with greens – by building out a color wheel and are grateful for the visual vocabulary that she gave to use for the rest of my life.

Her husband, my English Teacher, worked on my written vocabulary. To learn English from an Englishman is to feel closer to the source. He was an ex-rugby star and brought that kind of tough discipline to the language. Paragraphs needed to flow sentence by sentence as if the topic was a rugby ball being pitched from back to back. At their bests sports and literature have that same kind of natural ease, an economy of motion or words. He knew both of these well, and I can almost feel him still writing in margins about my abusive tendency towards metaphors and almost hear him coaching the sprinters during track practice how to high kick.

On one Hike Day many years ago he led me and two other students up the hill behind the school. The fog rolled in quickly and thick, and on the descent we missed a turn on the trail. We followed a canyon down as the shrubs became thicker. At a rest stop long after we had run out of water, he turned to me and said “I think I have broken my hand” in the same calm voice he used to say "this sentence is a bit awkward" or "try to show instead of tell."

A twig had gone completely through his hand and was poking through both sides. As we continued to hike first by the waning sun and then by the moon, the rugby warrior never mentioned his hand again. After the rescue when the doctors pulled the twig out he kept it in a small plastic jar, a souvenir of courage like rugby caps he won playing for England. He is the toughest man I know.

His wife might be the most graceful. At one parents’ weekend, my father was wandering around campus with the board of trustees. Excellent at real estate, he wasn’t the best for names and faces and got Mrs. Sykes confused with Ms. Graph, the Human Development teacher. He announced to the entire board that “this was the women teaching Arthur about sex” and she had the flair to laugh through such things.

Not that her husband didn’t accidentally get back at me. Sometimes if he came across a bit of homework that he liked he would read it to the class. It was quite a few months before one of mine was to his standard. He asked us to write about a body part and I decided to do a long treatise about the back of the girl’s neck who sat next to me at assembly (She was fascinated by Charlie Engs, sports star, one seat over so I had plenty of time to examine). And while this should have been a great moment of finally writing something worthy, a nice discourses about the slope of her lightly tanned neck popping out of tank top, the general piece was diminished because this girl also happened to be in our English class. He kept reading on, detail by detail – does she surf? Why does she like the tall blond guy? - Until both of us were deeply red.

We all had such moments. It was a time of such social pain and such giddy laughing, a vat of hormones in which some of your best friendships brewed. It was a time when awkwardness and achievement emulsified; in the same assembly you could be cheered for winning a soccer game or corrected for using the wrong preposition. You should spend a weekend and relieve this a bit. Tell your stories. Blush and laugh a few times.

Mostly what I remember about the Sykes was their kindness. As advisors they would invite over their small group from time to time. Sometimes the best cure for just being a teenager is a home cooked meal.

They must have needed that kindness later. I would love to say that they had the dream life, but after Mr. Skyes’ stroke I doubt it could be easy. There is courage to relationships that we never had to face in high school. While still occasionally tugged by hormones, as we drifted further from that time our bonds are more driven by logistics. The brightly colored canvases of our youth now have depth through chiaroscuro, the play of light and dark of our experiences. There was no way of knowing when they met for the first time at a party in her London flat that for so many years in the future together he would be silent, his once elegant voice trapped somewhere inside. You never know the disasters that can hit you on sunny October Tuesday.

While I suspect that it was never easy for them, a couple of years ago I came back to the Mesa and ran into them still smiling. She tends to him gently. He can still nod with approval, and he still recognized me as the guy who got lost in the woods. It meant so much after so many years that he still remembered me – that if our life is going to give us great disasters from time to time it also gives great friends.

And you should return to high school for a weekend to remember them. Two of the finest are retiring. They share the glow of the gifted ones that inspire you to be like them. You hope on your best days you could be a warrior during battles and an artist during calms. You should return.

Maui Channel 2005

We arrived at the Mala boat ramp sufficiently after sunrise that the sky had been bleached to a faded jean color, that half of other vessels had already started to load the bundles of food, sunscreen, and beer while the gentle waves pushed the ships up and down, and that the others still waiting for their turn huddled in tight packs of matching t-shirts, laughed nervously, and glanced quickly away to guess the conditions further out to sea. We were organized by a long chain of email that tried to anticipate what could go wrong and what we would need – the car rental, the place to stay, the air flights, the team name, the boat – that all started from a single thread, the note that was sent to twenty people that asked if anyone was interested in forming a six person relay team to swim the Maui Channel. The lucky ones replied.

John Donne said that, "No man is an island," but I believe that nothing is more human that to swim between them. It is our need for epic journey, to continue that travel that started across the grasslands of Africa and sent us into space - to reach sometimes further than we believe is possible. (In the case of swimming after the reach you are supposed to pull as you rotate.)

Our group was not only veteran swimmers, but each also had other superpowers. If we were comic characters we would be labeled like the Coach, the Captain, the Bartender, the House, the Driver, and the Mistress of Tunes. Our team name written on the make shift dolphin towel turned flag that we hung from the top of our boat was "Where the @#$% is the Kaanpali beach hotel," the finish line of the race and the location of the victory buffet.

Our name was also our mantra and a more reassuring phrase than what we heard when coming in from the airport. In the ample camaraderie that would define the weekend, a leathery fellow swimmer gave a ride to a couple of us from the airport. He had soloed the Maui channel the year before. Deeply impressed I asked him if he had ever gone further and he said that he had done the English Channel this year but that was nowhere near as hard as the Maui Channel. Nowhere near

This, the all time pre-race psych-out comment, scared me deeply as we motored over to race start on the island of Lanai. As we reached a tiny cove the Driver, a swimmer turned triathlete, jumped off the boat, headed to the beach to join the other teams' best swimmers, and tried not to be intimidated when the conversations on the starting line were about the Olympic trials. Doubly Irish her snowy skin was drenched in the most potent sunscreen manufactured on earth. Wearing a pink cap so we could easily see her among the heavy shoulder masses, she launched when the red starting flag was dropped. We saw her as she went through small flotilla that came for the race.

Next up was the Mistress of Tunes, the one who could not only navigate the deep waters but also equally important Ipod playlists. She was half Dominican and shrieked with joy when she saw a solo crossing by a fellow Dominican - the best part of trip because despite some assistance with medication she still had a hard time with seasickness. In fact the largest difficulty of the day wasn't the feared tiger sharks or jellyfish, but how to keep a stomach happy in a rolling sea. The chop was easier to deal while swimming in the waves than hanging on the rail of the boat, and she would often plunge in to give her digestive system a rest. With long powerful strokes she cruised through her half hour leg.

I, the least experienced swimmer, was next. The second thought that came to me (just after "I can't believe I am this far off shore") was how blue this sea was. That might sound cliché, but one of the things that I have learned from traveling for swims is how varied the palette of the ocean is. The San Francisco Bay always seems like a murky green while Cape Cod is a medium blue, and the Caribbean is almost azure. This sea had a darker blue, the kind of shade that football teams pick to increase their toughness, but with an endless clarity that only most pricey of gemstones have. The water temperature was a delightful warm just a couple of notches down from too hot but in that range where you could be comfortable either resting or cruising. With the exception of the waters around Capri, this might have been the most perfect place to swim that I have been, and I was lucky to get the leg that had least amount of chop.

After me was the Coach. She has the physique that only comes after multiple ironmans and was the only one to have done the race before. Some of her old teammates from her first race were back on a different, faster team. Fifteen-year veterans they had booked a luxurious catamaran, the Shangri-La, as their guide boat, but they still overcompensated the southern swells by going too far to the right. Those of us in the first few legs could site our swim direction off of the mast of the Shangri-La. It was the perfect metaphor that we would spend the day chasing paradise just further up the horizon.

Our team captain who had done a great job of organizing was the first one to ignore the Shangri-la and aimed off course up to Kapalula. He is a pilot by profession, and I would imagine quite used to planning his own route through life. The gang on the boat waved to him, and he corrected his course toward the two white matching hotels on the Kaanapali shore.

Our final swimmer was strong enough in the water that the Corona that she had before going into the water hardly fazed her. She has an infectious disposition, an aquatic Falstaff, that, well, would make the Jolly Rogers, jolly. She clicked with our boat captain who at one point of time must have been a great swimmer, but whose lifestyle on the island with poi, surf and rum, can kindly be said, has made him now a much better floater. He had the perfect name, Marco, for someone just coming out of the water disoriented, stocked the boat with tasty sashimi and mountain dew, and cut a pineapple so that it looked like a boat.

By two thirds of the way through the waves most of us were nursing our first corona and for the next round of ten-minute legs we thought this must be the easiest Maui channel crossing ever done. Distance swimming, like all endurance sports, has long stretches of loneliness. Sometimes in order to go far you must go alone.

But the brilliance of a relay team is that you can get a group together for a weekend and enjoy such wonders like watching shooting stars with a bottle chardonnay on a tennis court or seeing turtles bob up and down in a sunset soaked surf, that even as one person must be struggling against a sea it still left five in the boat to relax, and that there will be a group that you can always reminisce about the time you decided to swim between tropical volcanic islands.

Almost halfway through the third rotation, we realized that the Mistress of Tunes was the one who was going to reach shore on her leg. As soon as she got past the final swim buoys, we hopped in the water to join her for the last stretch that was protected by the black rock snorkeling area. We stroked and breathed the last hundred yards together and knew that we could be heroes, just for one day.

The One True Thing About Running: Falmouth Road Race

Running is the revolution that came to our doorstep. In the sixties my parents lived in San Francisco two miles away from the epicenter of counter culture, but the spirit of the era didn't reach them the same way that fog sometimes gets caught in the valleys of the city and can't drift over its peaks. But if the bra-less world of tie-dyed shirts never cluttered our family's closets, the one of waffle sneakers and synthetic shorts did. We witnessed the birth of jogging.

For generations my family has had a summer home in Woods Hole, a small town on the underbelly of Cape Cod known for marine biology and the place to catch the ferry to Martha's Vineyard. Falmouth, a town large enough to have a movie theater, lies seven miles away, and in 1973 a few people decided to make a run race between their favorite bars. I have no idea why this race caught on to such an extent other than it was in existence before the boom - the same way a couple of grad students who published their favorite links would wind up forming Yahoo. It was the right place in the right decade, and the opening wave on its starting line has contained the best runners this country has produced. In the seventies Bill Rogers and Frank Shorter, the last US gold medal winner in the marathon, were at the front. In the eighties Joan Benoit and Alberto Salazar ran the thing.

But as we would watch the elite field pass our driveway what I remembered more was the mass of people behind them. My family's place in on Church Street, the first right turn in race just before the bend that opens out to the long beach to the light house. It is a quiet road where kids walk holding their babysitters hands along the grassy sidewalks, and the loudest sound of the day is the ice-cream truck rolling through with little pictures of popsicles and sno-cones painted on its tan sides. But for one morning a year the place would rumble, not so much like a thunderstorm because those moans are only for half a minute, but more like the prolonged opening set of an Aerosmith show. Wave after wave of pounding would come, with the runners not quite at the first mile mark still having that determined glow of "I am here to race." Large runners, small runners, a wheel chair division, spandex clad women, men in oversized hats, track uniform kids, and more Red Sox's jerseys than actually sit in the dugout at Fenway - they all went by. At the end were the walkers waving to crowds like athletic Popes asking for encouragement from the dwindling spectators.

We would watch them all go by until the final motorcade rolled through and then head down the long driveway to the main house. I like to think that it would be at least an hour after we had watched this sweaty parade, one long hour while my parents, aunts, and uncles would argue over what to make to lunch after feeling just a little bit healthier for seeing this event, a mere hour while rocking on the wicker chairs at the end of the porch, before any of them smoked a cigarette.

Everyone has his or her own hobby, and a pack-a-day cigarette habit requires a certain commitment to nicotine. It seems like a distant world now - a place where not only could you eat brie during a pregnancy but could also wash it down with red wine. The drink of choice during cocktail hour, and it was called that, was gin and tonic. One of the favorite stories of my cousins was the time my brother tried to match drink for drink with my unsuspecting grandmother. She buried him in half an hour.

It wasn't that we didn't exercise - there was always sailing and tennis with our growing appreciation of Bjorn Borg. It was just that our sports were more conversational. A good joke could always cover a weak backhand, and the only way to handle a double fault was to laugh. Perhaps it was one of these little jests that caused my mom to decide to enter the road race in 1980. Our neighbor from across the street had an extra bib number, and so wearing her tennis shoes she decided that she would do it.

Everyone thought she was crazy.

* * *

"Running is your life," is what Joe Ueberoth told me in high school. It wasn't really meant as a compliment but more of a dig about pursuing something a little offbeat, the great crime of high school. But what I learned then and what I still believe is true is that it is far better to go through life being interesting than being cool.

Running was my life. In junior high I joined the track team and won my first varsity letter for gutting out the 800 meters. The summer before my senior year I completed my first Falmouth road race. My peak was coming in third at the county meet that year in the two-mile though still way too slow to do anything at the college level. I would run with a deep passion - the kind of nut would speed up going up hills just because I knew it would damage me less than the other runners, and give the raging testosterone through our bodies, there was no way they weren't going to follow.

I needed that passion because the one true thing about running is that it is really hard. It is repeats and pyramids, hills and track work. It is long days when you have gone out further than should and have to stumble home, and the early mornings when you start before you really wanted to wake but return smiling from having beat the sunrise.

It is a test of wills and we, Americans, having been losing at the elite level. There hasn't been a great US male distance runner in decades. The world had caught up with our training and they are, well for lack of a better word, hungrier. In a sense running is the same as poetry - a half century ago everyone knew the names of great living poets like cummings or Frost, but even now as no one knows who won the Pulitzer prize last year for poetry, our work is now published with refrigerator magnets and private emails. We are country of hacks, and I certainly have been guilty of stumbling through both.

* * *
I thought of doing the road race for over a year. I sent out a challenge to my cousins offering anyone a free ice cream at Dairy Queen if they came in first. I believe the best races are local and going back to salt breeze smells of my childhood was something I didn't want to miss.

The place had changed though. Fragrances were no longer purchased at candle shops, but at day spas. The drug store had become an espresso shop suggesting our general shift of self-medication. A mall on the outside of town was draining the merchants on Main Street like turpentine splashed across a Normal Rockwell painting.

The race had changed too. Not the mileage because that has to be a constant, but now registration was conducted three months earlier in an online lottery. You wear not only a bib with your number, but also a chip on shoe that activates on the start and finish lines. Rather than the great free for all there are series of waves ranging from the 4% body fat runners in the front to the entire workforce of Cheryl's pizzeria clad in day-glo green at the back. I was assigned to the pizza shirt wave and started next to two people - one wearing "I am running with Bob" and the other "I am Bob".

Not that I haven't had this before in a race - I am running further in a couple of weeks after a swim and a bike ride - but I think I wanted a little more of the simplicity of my memories. Because while I have gone longer distances, this race was the furthest I had gone back in time. Twenty-five years ago my mom ran this race when she was thirty-seven; an age that everyone thought was far too old to be out running; an age where she was burdened with three boys ages twelve, ten, and eight; and the age that I turn next week.

Our thirty-seventh years have little in common. I have not just finished adding a tennis court and swimming pool to my second home in Marin. My mom wasn't taking a spin class that measures her V02 max threshold and optimizes her training ranges. There are no children in my world. The return to my family summer home was eerily quiet the first day back; there was no background noise of kids screaming, and the energy of place felt subdued. No need for cocktails if there is nothing to take the edge off.

But when I think of the great feats that my mother has done the Falmouth Road Race is at the top of the list just ahead of swimming a mile across Tomales Bay for the first time at age fifty nine and trying to learn algebra so she could teach my youngest brother.

It is strange to realize now that my mother and I would not have been in the same social circles. You never expect the exact same life as your parents, but I think everyone believes that the journey would be at least somewhat familiar, however false a notion that is.

I wanted to do the race because I think it might have been the one time that our paths might have crossed. That somewhere on the other side of the two guys with the Bob t-shirts was a mother of three whose sons are terribly proud that she is doing this race. There is the old official race photo of my mom cruising to her 12-minute miles in puma shoes, and I have this great hope that somehow I could Photoshop us together. Mother and son framed as equals winding down the road side by side.

But a difference between then and now is that I don't believe that thirty-seven is too old for new journeys. The coach of a charity team that I ran with is ten years older than me and she still crushes me on a course. I have been buried by sixty-five year old men. There was a seventy five year old woman just behind the two Bob's who was doing the race for the twentieth time.

Yet I do believe is that we are all on the clock. There are only so many summer days to seize. My mom now walks with a limp and for longer distances with a cane. The neighbor from across the street, who did it for the first time with my mom twenty-five years ago, retired this year. "Sometimes," he told me, "it catches up with you."

The race, itself, was more brutal than I expected. I made sure that I was on the ride side of the road for going in front my family's place and they invigorated me as I went by. The hill up the lighthouse seemed small compared to the Bay Area's peaks, but by the time I had gone through the wooded area just before eel pond I felt pretty drained.

The unofficial weather report was "wicked muggy," and nasty heat is my nemesis for endurance events. I like to say that I have always beaten it, but there have been days, bitter days, when the heat has won. I no longer can run with the unchecked passion of my teens, but now must cruise at a gentler pace designed for a longer haul.

And maybe that is what turning thirty-seven is about. That passions have been checked with responsibilities. That perhaps the air is a little thicker to run through. That we are slower than we have been, but are so much more familiar with the route. That running, the mad scramble between our opportunities and disappointments, is our life.

Jive an' Wail

The coolest I might ever have been as an adult was in the summer of 1998. It was the waning years of the nineties when the papers rambled about Monica and the markets raged with online drug stores and supermarkets, a distant time of peace and dizzying motion when the word network became a verb and mindshare became the goal. If we were to experience the roar of the twenties then we had to steal its anthem. Swing was back in style.

I am not really sure how I convinced Amy Chamberlain to take swing dance classes with me. I think it was at a Christmas party when we got into a conversation about whether the animated character, Arthur, was really an Aardvark or a mouse. I was sticking to the mouse concept, but the early work proved that he once had a far less kid friendly proboscis. Somehow after this discussion, six months later we were swing dancing.

We found a small dancehall for classes in a neighborhood that is now called South Beach, but was then the China Basin. (I still don't understand the new name because it is neither south (it is on the east) nor a beach). The place had an appropriate seediness to remind us that swing came out of prohibition, but across the road the new ballpark was being built whose fans would be beautiful yuppies rather than the cold, bitter ones of the Candlestick. It was the last time for us to have edginess and we could dance like we didn't care.

Mercury, the Roman god, is a male, but in my own mythology the goddess for being everywhere at once is Amy. She had the ability to be both flakey and sincere. When you spent time with her you felt like you were in the center of the world, but you were never really sure when she would show up. I like to think that she believed that she could help everyone and almost had enough energy to pull it off.

And she did have such enthusiasm. I had no idea that this petite curly blond was an athletic dynamo. I was about a year from getting into any kind of shape having spent what it seemed like the decade eating at Taco Bell, and did my best just to try to keep up.

We twirled, cherry dipped and pretzel'd. But mostly we laughed.

Shakespeare wrote a sonnet comparing a woman to a summer's day, and if I had to pick a handful of days to be compared to (rather than the usual foggy ones), those four classes would be right in the mix. I wish I had the common sense then to realize that. There are the large moments like family reunions, weddings, and graduations that everyone knows to bring cameras to, but there are also those smaller ones that you wish you could capture and hold onto by something more reliable than fading memories.

We were wonders at turning and much better at dips than lifts. I never got down an over the back maneuver, but when we got caught halfway through a pose and wound up stuck like the board game twister we would just giggle to the dismay of our colleagues who seriously thought they could audition for the next Gap commercial.

The hard thing is that dances are fleeting and so are summer days.

I saw Amy only occasionally after that. A couple of years later we ran into each other at Portland Marathon. I think she had finished, showered, written a children's story, and come back to transition area, by the time I crossed the line. She could do it all.

And that is why it is so hard to find out that she has past. I mean how does someone like that drown? I got the news abroad and the reality of it still seems so distant.

I want to believe that she is out there way ahead – it could be another marathon, it could be Africa, it could be at a friend's wedding dancing – that she is just over the horizon giggling at the wonder of trying to do it all.

Backroads

I kept getting lost in France. The instructions from our Backroad's guides were more than adequate; if they were recipes, they would have not only the ingredients and the temperature, but also the right way to slice the vegetables and where to shop for the meat. The rest of the service from my luggage being taken from room to room, to the little jokes at rest stops, to the water bottles always being filled were equally well thought out, but still I wound up seeing a little bit more of France than I expected.

The group came from places like Boston, Cleveland, Texas, and Washington and followed the roads better than I did. They mostly made the proper turns save for a few unmarked roads, the doom of any directions. But for me the turns started to blend after a while. We constantly made lefts at yield signs, veered right around churches, and the second spoke at rotaries. France can seem like an endless maze of small grey cafes nested around churches and Post Offices. The new holy trinity of France is no longer the father, the son, and the spirit; but the church, the food, and the government ministries.

Some of these towns blurred, but some of the villages were a gorgeous in the same way the French summer peaches were - tantalizing in both brevity and intensity. There were a couple of moments while biking, perhaps after the delirium from making it up a hill or the quick breath from taking a turn a little fast - moments that we could see bales of hay rolled into impressionist cylinders instead of American cubes, or a group of cows grazing on the same field that British intelligence had to parachute to get data for d-day, or just an archipelago of red poppies in a sea of yellow mustard that we knew that we were in that mental postcard we first dreamt when booking the bike ride and the same memory we will return to when thinking about work after coming home.
That this is what it meant to be in rural Brittany and Normandy.

And sometimes we could tell by the smell. The scent of barns is universal. And the bugs that accompanied it as well.

Yet if the country doesn't always smell like flowers, at least the French version has old buildings to visit. The first day we biked to a sacked castle that was just only slightly larger the mansion we stayed in that evening. The next day we saw Fort La Latte, which unfortunately was not the French headquarters of Starbuck's, but it was perched on top of large bluff and had a large furnace to heat cannonballs instead of espressos. The cannonballs would take about six hours to heat up, so whatever ship that was in range would leave the harbor and probably have headed up the coast for the very nice cove where we had picnic by the sea.

Both of these days were just preludes to Mount St. Michelle - the Alcatraz of the abbey world. It is built on and into its own rock, which when the tide was high it would be its own island. The stones for the abbey's construction had to be floated on by boats from a nearby island, and the construction took centuries. I like to think of it as the first software project. During the audio tour we learned the first idea came as a vision, but then section after section fell down and was rebuilt.. There was the cloister 2.0, the facade 3.0, and the mission statement of the place had changed from church, to fort, to jail, to tourist trap.

The rain came the next day after we went to the tapestries in Bayeaux and headed the Normandy coast to where the allied troops landed.
Clutched tightly in my right hand the road instructions were well on the way to confetti. Somewhere in the gap between two of the threads was the instructions to make a right, but I continued on the same gravelly road. It lead me to an unexpected point, a small rocky beach covered in rotting kelp and wooden spikes. The storm had passed, but there were still a few eager clouds ahead hoping to catch up to the group.

In the distance was Utah Beach where the General Roosevelt had landed along with thousands of others on d-day, but now the place was empty except the waves and gulls. These beaches are flatter and simpler than you think from the movies like Saving Private Ryan. It is easy to say that they have the serenity of impressionist painting, because, well, it actually is where Seruat invented pointillism. He did several studies of Port en Basin where we stayed the last few nights of the journey. The rambling Atlantic was the foundation of the splotches that defined the genre and it simple blues and greens were perfect for the limited palette of the starving impressionists. The brightness of the Mediterranean would be added later with Van Gough, but for a moment, that brief year of 1888 (surprisingly not covered in vh1 I love the 80's), the place was in the center of the idea that you paint by dots.

I like to think of these beaches existing in both of those concepts, that they could be on both girls' impressionist wall calendars and in the boys' d-day video game, that there is such a duality of pain and peace, and that both revolutions of artistic innovation and military achievement can exist on the same sand.

The British landing at Arromanche was the best of the later. They actually floated over an entire dock a few days after the main landing.
Parts of the structure still exist like concrete beached whales.

I believe that travel has a similar dichotomy of the joy of new things combined with the desperation of good logistics.

I know that even as I kept getting lost in France, the week spent in bike shorts and racing jerseys was one of the best I have had in a while.

Sith Sliding Away

There is a moment of dialog when Darth Vader sounds like George Bush and mutters, "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy," which comes off a bit unfair because most of the time our president sounds like Yoda – "Freedom, weapons of mass destruction is." But if the moral glue between the latest three Star Wars films and the original ones is (besides the importance of familial microcholridians) that there are shades of grey then my opinion of the last film is also in that murky limbo.

The film is about a man struggling to manage his career with his impending fatherhood and making some rather bad choices. Puff Daddy Vader is Othello in a galaxy far, far away. Not only because both rolls have been played by James Earl Jones, but because they share a nasty temper. No one criticizes Shakespeare on plausibility, but basically one misplaced handkerchief leads to a large body count. Lucas has better special effects, not all of which go into Natalie Portman's hairstyles, to make that same character transition, but lacks the playwright's language even if he did get the author of Shakespeare in Love to assist him with the script.

There was no help for the acting.

I think the first three films worked the best because Lucas had the fortune of casting two of the most archetype actors of the last century – the thespian's thespian in Alec Guinness and the intellectual action star in Harrison Ford. I think only Larry O. and Bogart would have been better, but I don't think either would have worked for scale. Ewan McGregor's wonderful smile is perfect when singing Elton John love songs to Nicole Kidman, but comes off as out of place as Chewbacca doing a cell phone commercial. It is a hard film when I think the actor that does his best work is R2D2.

So while I don't think Lucas did a very good job of capturing Shakespeare's themes, he does a much better job of playing to the front of the audience. The effects are amazing to the point that unbelievable becomes real. For the first film he had to put a couple of fur suits on elephants from Marine World to create mounts for sand people, but now he lives in a world of pixels where someone can ride on a lizard and there are neither wires nor seams to see. The animated character of General Grievous is so well done that we forget than he is descent of the same technology that gave us Jar Jar Binks and Ally McBeal's Dancing Baby.

Yet at times the technology almost too dominated the film – I think Lucas would love to replace everyone in the cast with robots if he could. (I see the continued casting of Jude Law in movies (but not in this one) as part of the same larger trend).

I went back to see the original's light saber battle and while it looked so grounded, because it was after all two old guys just taking hacks at each other, it felt more emotionally fulfilling. Now the rattling of swords are almost secondary to the mid air flips. The fencing has been reduced to rhythm gymnastics, and has the same gravitas shift from a battle where warriors clash to a competition where costumes matter. The Lord of the Rings is such a superior filmmaking effort not because Legolas can do a better triple pike, but because Peter Jackson has the common sense to use the effect sparingly. In one of his better sword fight plays, Hamlet, Bill wrote, "brevity is the soul of wit," and George seemed to miss all three – the brevity, the soul and the wit.

The best that can be said is that we get closure on that far away land (far better than we will ever get in Iraq). There is no surprise that Vader is going to have twins, but it was nice to know why Luke got screwed with being stranded on a desert planet with the last name equivalent of Stalin, and Leia got to be a princess. I think this movie has a great sequence for the fate of the various Jedi, which is better than anything in the prior two films, and seeing the helmet put on Vader is more devastating than any of the carnage done to a death star.

I am not with the new film nor am I its enemy; I am not Mark Anthony seeking to bury Lucas nor praise him. The movie is worth a couple of hours of summertime and the price of a ticket, but I don't think it will linger in my subconscious. Perhaps it is the final end of the nostalgia for being a child during the seventies, that I, too, like Vader will need to put on the heavy gear of responsibly and sigh frequently at work. But I think that there still will be magic out there, even if I have to wait a few more weeks for the next thing at the multiplex.

Twice Around

I think the first time you do any sport you play by the Rocky I rule. The goal is to last the fifteen rounds of the experience while some short old guy says, "you're an animal". Bruised and bewildered you should finish aware enough to shout out for the shy pet store girl and if lucky collect an Oscar for best picture. You will get later attempts to handle Creed, the Russian, or Mr. T. The first time is about going the distance.

The clerk at the local ski store was the first person I told that I was thinking about skiing a 50k. I explained to him that I hadn't skied since Reagan was in office and the goal was by the end of winter to be able to ski that length under the five hours and fifteen minute time cut off with the small issue that it never snows at my home city. I asked "What skis would do you recommend?"

He looked at me at the same way that a dog owner looks at their pet when they realized it swallowed a golf ball. "You know that fifty kilometers is really far?" Instead of buying, I rented skis for a while.

At the Team in Training information meeting (a fundraising organization for Leukemia Research), Dave, who became one of my coaches, talked about how 25k was the equivalent of a ski marathon, and he was thinking about emphasizing the valor of 10k for novice skiers. I asked him what it would take for the 50k. He, too, said, "that 50k is really far."

But I spent the winter practicing anyway with patient coaching and quality three-hour car rides. I was in decent shape but still had technique problems. I have three athletic attributes - I am good on a kickboard in a pool, I get very hot when I exercise, and I have strong determination. Coordination isn't a personal skill and even now I still can only really pole on my left side and can't really balance very well on my right leg. I look longingly at the gracefully strides of expert skate skiers the same way that a prairie dog must look at a gazelle. At some point there must have been a common evolutionary ancestor, but we each had specialized a long time ago.

Headed to the race I was confident that I could make the time cutoff unless there was a snowstorm or I messed up my hydration. For the later I had been practicing by putting perpeturm, a sugary fuel mix like cool aid with the calories cranked up, in with water into my camelbak reservoir for nutrition. It is trail mix in a tang format.

For the weather, the six times I went to practice skiing I had nothing but blue skies and 40-degree highs. I had lucked into missing all of the snowy days in the Sierra, and it had been one of the driest winters in the Rockies. If it were to snow I would have to improvise.

The night before the flight to Bozeman, I put the perpetum in the camelback and carried small snacks on the plane. I had not been to Montana since right after graduating from college for my roommate's wedding and looked forward to seeing him, his wife, and their four kids. It had been a long time.

Bozeman is a charming compact town that blends quickly into the rolling hills and jagged peaks that surrounds it. A love of hiking is almost a requirement for citizenship, and there very well could be more dogs than people. It has successfully kept its main street, a victory against the malls of America, and shops range from the expected sporting goods store with a rifle as a logo and gift shop with a moose crossing sign in the window to the unusual authentic Thai restaurant named Smilers. In San Francisco a place called Bang and Tail would be a bar, but in Bozeman it sells biking and skiing equipment. Foot apparel is available at Boots and Shoes, with the later seeming like an afterthought when shuffling through the mud of the early spring thaw. It is a boot kind of town except for the scuba shop, which felt about out of place as me. If in California we dream of mountain retreats, then from time to time in Montana they must think of warm beaches. Escapism is universal.

My roommate's kids are being raised as good Christians and Red Sox fans. They wear the caps more of the second and don't seem amazed that the Red Sox won the series. Faith is the strength that gets you through winters not just Octobers. My Giants lack Montana's natural modesty and kindness, but my roommate's family has that by the bushel.

After a pleasant day spent in Bozeman, complete with a tour of the noodle on stick art sculpture and nice morning walk, I met up with the rest of my teammates for the bus trip down to West Yellowstone. Instead of looking out the window to see actual wildlife we watched a video about a pack of wolves called the Druids that were released from their cages and sent out with GPS collars into Yellowstone. They played, howled, and hunted together, and I thought about how our own little team of charity skiers had done a similar adventure of traveling out into a new world unsure of the terrain but confident that we could handle the task together. The wolves then ate a deer and bred off-camera to make a litter of four cubs, and I felt the analogy wasn't going to work as well.

The ski race wasn't the only thing in West Yellowstone that weekend; there was also Sno-Blast, a convention for artic cat snowmobile dealers. Snowmobiliers are people who enjoy nature with the smell of napalm. They wear thick helmets to mask the sounds of their engine for themselves but leave the noise for everyone else and large neon jumpsuits that make them look like the Pillsbury Doughboy with a Star Wars fetish. They are the answer to the question of what would happen if bad taste were given a bunch of money and proceeded to drink heavily, smoke consistently, and destroy the hotel hot tub.

Needless to say there was a slight body composition difference between the cross-country skiers and the snowmobiliers, and I was a little disheartened when the hospitality clerk got me confused with the snowmobile crowd. I wanted to lean over to her and say "no, really I am here to do the 50k," but I think she would have just pointed me to the bar and told me to keep drinking.

The town of West Yellowstone was friendly like that. The ski shop there that sounds like a San Francisco bar is called "Free Heel and Wheel" and serves a great mocha. Most of the town was motels and gift shops, but they did have an I-Max theatre that showed NASCAR racing twice a day and a small zoo consisting of grizzly bears and wolves. I wondered how the animals felt to be caged so close to an actual park and thought the experience must be similar to the prisoners in San Quentin who can look out across San Francisco Bay to the sourdough city. Escapism is universal.

After race registration, a pasta dinner, a good night's sleep, and two pancakes for breakfast I arrived at the starting line for a quick warm-up. I was in the last wave with most of my coaches and lined up next to them. For the first fifty yards of a ski race you must double poll, which is to say you can't use your legs. The gun went off and I pressed forward. I could poll well, but my entire team had passed me on the first hill. It was going to be a long day.

Thirty minutes into the race it started snowing. It was a light flurry at first but then turned to large wet flakes that clung to my sunglasses. The 50k race had become a great deal harder.

One of the secrets of endurance racing is know what you can and cannot worry about. Your thoughts won't change the weather and so it is important to concentrate on what you can control - your pace and fueling. I took the first sip out of my camelback and realized only then that after three days perpetum in water ferments. Nothing grows in Gatorade, but the problem of drinking something healthier is that it was healthier for other creatures as well. Despite my careful preparation, my camelback was useless, and I would have to rely in the food I kept in my pockets and the water on the course.

By the first water stop I had passed a coach and her partner. They have much better technique than I do, but the thick snow meant that gliding wasn't going to work very well. Without the glide we were left to run through the snow with two very large sticks attached to our legs so everyone was going to be awkward – dashing across the snow, we looked more like penguins that deer. With my heart rate was ten beats above where it should be, I was worried that I was going out too fast because but there was a loose 11:30 am time cut-off for the first lap and I had not this far just be push aside.

Despite the weather I kept getting hotter and spent most of the time looking at the backs of two skiers ahead of me. By the third water stop I passed them as well in full throttle to make 11:30. Right towards the end, just before the Subaru ski team lapped me, I caught another group of teammates/coaches.

I went down the long straightway to the lap marker at 11:34 and was very nicely allowed to continue. (The year before the cutoff was noon, so they weren't sticking too hard on this point). The race close was at 2:30 pm so I would need to the second lap in just under three hours.

I shed my useless camelback and long sleeve shirt and gave these to our team managers extraordinaire, Barb Smalley and Ananda Baron, who kindly checked on everyone. They were next to the race director and could listen on the radio for our race numbers - mine was number 390. Down to a red fleece vest and a short sleeve t-shirt I headed out again to do the course one more time.

I don't believe in second chances. Even if you arrive back to exactly where you were before, you will be older and more tired when you look at that same path. Not that there isn't the longing - I have the times when I wish I wasn't as shy like a life long audition for the lead in "Sideways" - but the things you do can't be taken back.

One of those days I wish I could do over was May 2, 2004, the last time I did a race with Team in Training. The Olympic distance triathlon race was meant to be a tune up for a longer one a few weeks later, but I made a series of mistakes and was betrayed by two of my athletic features - that I exercise hot and that I am determined to go through anything.

That day I was amped from watching my teammates do well the day before and when I passed the final transition on to the run course the cheering of young, attractive women made me want to push even harder. I drank water and Gatorade before and during the race, but in retrospect I should had five water cups at each stop instead of just one.

The last thing I remembered I was three hundred yards from the end of the race at the base of the final hill with the finish line just around the corner.

I woke memoryless in a hospital. A mere minutes away from the end I had a heat stroke and seizure and had to be helicoptered out. A heat stroke is when the water in your brain has evaporated and your circuits are literally frying. I fear for what I might have lost. Barb came as quickly to the hospital and after an overnight stay I was released physically okay but restricted from doing any events in the heat.

A few months later I realized that if I could go far in the heat then I should try it in the cold and decided to switch sports to cross country skiing and came up with the silly goal of a 50k.

Yes, I don't think we ever get truly get second chances, but what we can get is second loops. Often we tend to travel in circles and when we come to that familiar fork, more worn and weary, we know the weight of each. The first time through a loop is done with blind exuberance that we had in our twenties. But now as we wander the second time through what we lack with energy is made up with focus.

This ski race wasn't a comeback. I can't return to the heat. But it was a chance for me to show that I still could go out and seize a day. Perhaps I wasn't the dominant wolf in the pack, but I still could hunt and howl at the moon. This race was about going the fifteen rounds.

I slowed down to conserve energy and returned to the first water stop just as they were closing it. They had already removed the trail markers but still had some water and PowerAde left. They asked me how many people were behind me, and I told them at least six. As I left they poured some more cups, which I didn't realize were going to be left unused.

On the second loop without kilometer markers I had no idea how fast I was going because I could not see anyone ahead either and kept myself amused by mumbling movie quotes. My favorite was King Théoden from the "Two Towers" when he was on the wall at Helms Deep as a sea of orcs attacked, "Is this all you have Saruman? Is this the best you can do?"

But whom I should have been really quoting was Frank the Tank from the movie "Old School." The two of us shared a moment of being out on our own without much clothing convinced very much that there was a pack of like mind people following them. Franks wife pulled him aside and asks him what he is doing and in a slurred moment of exuberance he responded, "We are streaking".

I was out there, too, streaking and striding in my short sleeve shirt. Only there was no one in a minivan to pull me over. The skiers behind me had left the race, and I am making a new rule that you know it is a tough ski day when your coaches from Alaska and Latvia drop out because of bad conditions. Later back at the hotel, we would joke that DNF stands for "definitely not foolish" But I had only me, two flasks of hammer gel, and geeky movie quotes to keep me going.

I only started to really worry when I found the second water stop had been abandoned. I had not seen anyone in an hour and wasn't carrying water. I could still follow the deep tracks, and onward I trudged. I started to fall more going down hills because my core muscles were tired, and the climbs seemed twice as long the second time around.

I wasn't the only one worried. Ananda and Barb were frantically listening on the radio for skier 390. If it had been anyone else, anyone who they hadn't been to the emergency room the time before, anyone who tended to be at least somewhat sane during a race, they probably would have relaxed, but I was the last one out. Why was I out there with a short sleeve shirt? Could anybody see me? If they can put GPS collars on wolves why can't they put them on skiers?

50k is far. It is roughly five miles further than a marathon. Sometime between what would have been the second and third water stops I passed that point slower than I have ever run that distance. It was going to be a long day. The one little bit of luck I had graced me at the third water stop. They had still had a few cups left and some cookies, and again I left some water for the non-existent people behind me.

Invigorated I looked at my watch and realized that I was going to have to really step it up to make the 2:30 pm cut-off. I started to push hard again and saw my first person in about two hours who was taking apart some of the 10k course. He radioed back to the finish line, and Ananda and Barb were relieved.

I ran into the head coach with about 3k left on the course and kept pressing to make the time. One wrong turn during the final chute made a me have to go over some gravel to get to the finish line. My watch said 2:26 and I felt I did not go all this way to let mere gravel get in the way. I hopped over the gravel and skied back and forth to the finish line. Expecting me to come down a different route six of my teammates came running down to greet me at the end. Ananda quickly put an old fleece over my exposed arms. The clock was at 2:27:30. Two and half minutes to spare.

I finished 164 out of 164 roughly fifty minutes behind anyone else. Of the 209 people who entered the race 45 did not finish which is just over 21%. The people with common sense were from places like Saskatchewan, Colorado, and Vermont where winter isn't just a weekend folly. One of the Subaru professionals called it a day early, as did four of my coaches. I was the sole team in training participant to finish and one coach and our category two bike racing captain finished as well. I have never been dead last at anything and felt so proud.

I had gone the fifteen rounds.

And if Rocky can shout at the end of his match so can I.

I want to really thank Ananda and Barb. One day we will have an ordinary race day with fair temperatures and sunny skies. We have been through so much together, and I hope you remember the good parts. I cried a little when Ananda drove me to MacDonald's afterward because I was so happy to have finally reached that finish line that has escaped me for ten months. And so happy that I could share it with her.

I want to thank my mentor Tracy and her partner Sigrida for so much guidance and not to mention rides up and back the to slopes every other weekend. I hope my offbeat humor was offset with my spiffy iPod.

I want to thank the coaches and captains, and especially Scott for leading the entire gang.

50k is far, and while I won't pretend that it wasn't deeply personal I won't forget the other reason I did it. I am just so grateful to have done a second lap, but the purpose of the program is to give cancer patients a second lap of their own. During the course of training we heard statistics like 80% survival rate, which can seem abstract at times. But when I look at the numbers of the race as a comparison, I realize that 20% can include quite a few people who are noble and special on their own. I don't want to lose any of them.

Thanks again to all

I honked at Santa Claus

I honked at Santa Claus.

To be completely honest, I honked about two hundred Santa Claus’s, but I think pounding the horn at any Saint Nick isn't good. Coming back from shopping and late for a spa appointment I was going down Third Street, a block away from mission, when the Honda Civic ahead of me suddenly stopped for the first Santa Claus crossing from the Museum of Modern Art side of the street to the Yerba Buena Gardens. Before the Honda Civic could start came the next Santa, and then the next.

The fifth Santa stopped in the middle of the road and did a pelvic thrust at the cars. The seventh Santa carried a sign with the words "Santa X - Crossing" that looked rather obvious given the number of red jackets and caps that had just gone by. There were lanky Santa’s and stout ones. There was a transvestite Santa and a plump bouncy Korean Santa who nearly fell out of her red shorts.

There was more facial hair than the Phish farewell concert, and the pack gave the sense that they had all camped together at Burning Man a half a year ago. One Santa put candy canes on the cars’ windshields, much the same way flowers were put into the rifles at Kent State. It was getting later and later, and I kept wondering if it was okay to clip an elf.

One came by with reindeer antlers, and a few wore mini skirts. Some of those were girls. Having reached some sort of holiday critical mass, none of them stopped for the traffic lights. I guess on Christmas Eve if Santa obeyed all the highway laws he would never be able to get to all of the nice little girls and boys around even if he excluded the pagan ones. Still I can’t remember too many Christmas carols discussing the merits of civil disobedience or the need to goof helpless people in cars.

I started honking.

It was out of frustration that kept me hitting the horn. The massage therapist I see is brilliant at working on my rotator cuff injury, and I really did not want to miss the appointment. The holidays are stressful enough that the kneading of hamstrings becomes almost essential.

But it was after I had done two steady minutes of pounding that I wondered if I was the biggest jerk on the planet. Who honks at Santa because they are late for the spa? Is this pretty much how you get in the express lane to hell? Was my place on Santa’s homeland security naughty list now etched in stone? Did Scrooge insult peasants during his carriage rides? Am I going to be visited by three ghosts who are going to tell me that I should have made a better move on that one girl during a college summer? Is there nothing but coal for me?

I think we are all busy. Those that are married with kids live in coordinated world of carpools to soccer games or birthday parties. In the "other" category my evenings are spent shuffling to spin class, master swims, lecture series, poker nights, Giants' games, and an occasional movie. We live in a world fueled by Ritalin and caffeine, and in our great rush so starved for time for careers, family, friends that we from time to time push through politeness in the attempt to get just a few moments more. Or we might just sometimes be tired and cranky.

I am starting a new project, cross-country skiing, which I have not done since Reagan was in office. It is a fundraiser for team in training 75% of what I raise goes directly to cancer research and patient services. (if you would want to donate please go to http://www.teamintraining.org/personalpages/page.adp?user_id=164696&event_id=549156 )I need to work out on my Christmas karma somehow - seasonal giving is a good way to balance out the holiday crankiness.

Our only time out on the slopes the coach looked at me with my legs flailing in the preset tracks like Keith Richards at the Rolling Stones office holiday party and wondered how I could just spend so much energy to go nowhere. I wanted to tell her that I had a lot of practice, but I was a little too out of breath for that.

She told me the secret to skiing long distances was the glide zone. Push then glide. Push then glide. If you keep pressing constantly you don’t go anywhere.

I want to apply this elsewhere. In college there was a work hard play hard mentality, which came close, but I think I could this time of year a work hard play easy approach. To misquote the Cranberries I really should let things linger.

Santa, after all, specializes at one hard day of work followed by 364 of kicking back at the pole. I do hope that he in the off hours at his workshop understands how being in a hurry can drain seasonal cheer. I like to think that he, too, must be a speed freak with a carbon fiber sled and getting the fastest reindeer, "Blitzen", he can.

So my wish is that if he could take just a small moment of forgiveness for my breakdown at Third Street and Mission, and that this year he will bring something to help me learn how to glide.

Mayans

It is the off-season, and after a month of an improbable baseball games, two weddings, and two engagement parties, Octobers optimism has shed into November anxiety. There are only so few times we can pick our future – a time you decide to cross a room to talk to someone who catches your eye who winds up becoming your spouse, a moment when you decide on a school because they were throwing Frisbees on the main quad or the job learn about over a cocktail that gives you a fist full of stock. Troubled by our uncertain future I went to the Legion of Honor Museum to find out about our past.

The Mayan exhibit was the main attraction, and I used an accoustiguide to compensate for my ignorance of native Southern Americans. These devices have changed from their modified tape players of the eighties; they have switched to digital access through typing in key codes at each statue. Someday I wonder whether we will have museums for old accostiguides. They are the information descendants of scrolls and stone tablets, but have yet to acquire the necessary dust.

There were two tracks available – one for adults and one for children. The children one was narrating by an adolescent descendant of the Mayans. She talked about breaking her nails in one section and how like totally great her ancestors were. I stuck with the adult track.

I learned about the Mayan gods. They had one for rain, one for corn, and, best of all one for chocolate. The vase saluting coca had a large guy with a potbelly comfortably reclining in his thrown. There civilization was a thousand years from the remote control, but they had laid the groundwork.

They loved sports and had a game where you wore a barrel. I am sure whichever team was the Yankee equivalent had the most expensive wood. They had music and writing.

And they had ritual bloodletting. Granted this isn't too far away from the Christian blood themed communion, but rather being on the receiving end of hemoglobin, priestesses would cut their tongues and drain themselves to inspire visions. The future must have always tasted bitter.

They also bled their prisoners. But rather than using Rumsfield to cover up their brutality they made steps shaped like prisoners and murals to boast their triumphs. It was at this point I wondered what exactly was playing on the kid's accoustiguide.

How can you look at the sorrow of this world and present it to a child? I did type the children's code at the great mural at the end of the show and the girl said that sometimes her ancestors did things that upset her, but she was still proud of them.

Coming out of the museum I realized I was still in a world with two different tracks. One is color-coded red that captures our religious and warring fever. The other is blue from seeing the millions of jobs lost, thousands killed, and hundreds tortured. One believes that our president wasn't responsible for most of this, and the other wants a responsible president.

Together we as a country must see the same things, but somehow we have typed different codes into our accostiguides. I can't help but wonder what would have happened if four years ago if four hundred votes switched in Florida. I believe the airplane attack was inevitable, but the economic, cultural, and diplomatic damage from the deficit and wars afterwards were completely optional. There was a time four years ago when we could have been on a different road than the one we are on now.

And we just passed another point of return. I have no idea what the validation of the president's policies will be. I have no idea where intellectually drained visions from his god will lead us. As magnificent as Mayans were they, too, did crumple. There has been no nation, no culture that at the height hadn't purged itself. The Romans, the French, the Germans, the Russians, and the Chinese all have had moments of extreme nationalism with a high body count.

I feel lost now. Disillusioned. I know that I will still try to comfort myself with mocha and baseball. But the future once again tastes like blood.

Game 6

Fear Game Six.

Fear it with all your heart.

It is the witching game, the moment when summer finally freezes.

It is Calton Fisk, Bill Buckner, and Dave Robertson dropping a Joe Jackson fly ball to give Chicago its last World Series in 1917.

It is the rally monkey. It is Joe Carter.

Fear Game Six.

It is two weeks before Halloween, and, perhaps even scarier, two weeks before President Bush might get reelected. (Or elected if you believe the Florida Supreme Court).

We all have such times. There are divorces, downsizing, and trips to the emergency room. There are the compromises, the arguments, the broken promises.

It is the twilight of our dreams, the time when we wake just before the alarm clock goes off but still remember our sleep.

Linger there. Huddle underneath those sheets. Fear Game Six, but know there is a chance, a fluke, a possibly of something a little larger. That sometimes even after our mistakes and mishaps that we catch a break out of nowhere. That sometimes you get a Game Seven.

The Writing Process

George Orwell and Joan Didion both wrote short essays entitled "Why I write." I am not really sure what wisdom was in those pieces but I do very much believe the secret to writing is to put a really famous name in the first sentence. Muhammad Ali and Piers Anthony also work here. If you have a particularly long and vague essay, it is the best to start with De Tocqueville - preferably in the original French. This can be accomplished by putting an "ez" at the end of most words.

I often get asked about my writing process, usually by the same voices in my head that give me an Oscar every year for best Supporting Actor. I tell those voices that I start with the all of the verbs. This makes the piece move. I list them off in order (wrote, sure, believe, embezzle, etc...) and stick in simple ones in case I want to write a boring paragraph or a shopping list.

Next I add the conjunctions for structure. Most great authors like George Orwell, Joan Didion, and De Tocqueville talk about structure. The important thing I gathered was that you should have a good structure. No one really talked about a bad structure or whether it was supposed to be sturdy or moist.

Sometimes I get comments that I have no structure or stuff like "what is this shopping list doing in the middle of your piece?" But if I tell them that it is a neo deconstructionist style, they usually just leave it there. The key is to put the "neo" part in, because even if the person you are talking to knows what neo deconstructionist could possibly mean, they will be worried that your "neo" might be even more "neo" than the one they have.

Finally, I sprinkle in the adjectives and nouns like toppings on a salad bar or a make your own sundae bar if you aren't dieting. I find that caramel really goes well with chocolate ice cream, but you know it is a world class one if it has Heath Bar shavings.

Closing an essay gets tricky. Usually I just cheat, look what I wrote in the first paragraph, and just use it over again. So, in conclusion what George Orwell and Joan Didion must have written at some point:
Eggs
Butter
Milk
Heath Bar

Spiderman, Too

The first time I asked a girl, Natalie, to marry me, she immediately said, “Yes.” Then again she might have been the one who proposed. I can’t remember exactly whose idea it was and have forgotten several other major details like the time of year. I want to pretend that it must have been summertime, the lush season with plums, nectarines and blueberries, and the long day’s light that gives everything such warmth that the universe seems endlessly ripe and tender even if it is tempered with the reality of sun burns and insect bites.

I do remember the place. We were at my parents’ weekend home in a hammock underneath the redwood deck. From the deck you could see patches of Tomales Bay through scraggly oak trees, but underneath there was just our own little world in a section that my mom decided that she did not need to garden, and the deer tended to avoid.

We were wise enough then to know that there would be difficulties. All relationships have those obstacles, not so much of late night shared insomnia but the questioning on the ride home on a Tuesday "is this really the right thing" as if it there could be an answer for something like that in the back of a teacher edition of life’s little handbook. Still we knew we could handle these things because we had such bravery then, and we would face together the major dilemma that we were eight years old.

She must have been the one to propose as a way of getting me to place some kind of ultimate version of the game of house. It might be fine to have little teas with stuff animals, but if you really wanted the ultimate domestic experience hold out for an actual boy.

Most change when wandering into a relationship, but there is a part of you that you want to hold onto. Not so much your soul because that is the first thing that love takes, but your desires and sometimes your toys. A friend of mine was upset that in order to get her boyfriend to move in she had to agree to DSL, a plasma screen TV, and a leather recliner. I wish that I had told her that soon after he moved in that they would start to use the “we” word consistently and spend more weekends together going to Beds, Bath and Beyond than he would get to go surfing. However, I also knew the ability to watch Sports Center is a right that we, men, are not going to relinquish whatever the odds.

On the hammock the deal that I ultimately pitched to Natalie for our great future is that if we were to be married then I got to be Spiderman.

She thought that this was a fair trade and said okay. She also wanted superpowers and I think we came up with the name Queen Spider for her. This was all before we had gone to the class where we learned that from a guy’s perspective the spider marriage is not really a great idea. But we were strong enough then to hold off on any biological urges. It would be years later before I had my first kiss.

She said we would have two kids - first a girl and then a boy.

I thought that was fantastic as long as they both were radioactive.

Of course, she insisted and we wandered off to tell our parents the good news. Mine gave me the same look that they had when I kept on insisting that we did science projects like baking mud in the oven just to see what would happen. Unfortunately, I lost interest in that after a while and the great field of microwave geology was never created.

Natalie’s parents, I think, were friends of my mom, and they were visiting from someplace like Kansas. I know that it was distant and had to be in some far off exotic world like one of those planets in Star Wars. Perhaps Nebraska or the East Bay. I never saw her again after that day.

A few years ago my mom softly told me, in the way that I learned that our goldfish were gone, that Natalie had married somebody else. I still remembered her, but less of an actual being and more as a concept of that one great afternoon when you really made a wonderful discovery even if it did not involve a nuclear reactor.

Spiderman Two is opening up across the country right now and I think of all of those children going see it. I hope it catches them in that twilight time before the reality of fractions enters in when they can believe for just a few years that the best thing in the world is to have a girl look longingly at you when you tell her your hopes for super powers.

Slacked Keys

My family goes to Hawaii often. Not that every trip has been flawless – there was the time we rented a motor home only to have most of us come down with diarrhea - but there is something wonderfully relaxing about being in the tropics. It meets the twin goals of vacations, a place both to rest and to explore.

On a Tuesday night we ventured to the Ritz Carlton in Kapalula for an evening of the Masters of Slack Guitar series. It cost a mere $35, but we knew someone who Hulas there who let us in for free. Behind the stage was a tapestry of a Hawaiian sunset made in the same artistic style that decorates the interiors of airplane's economy class cabins, and our chairs had little desks in case we felt the urge to take notes. A balding man went to the front to introduce the headliners, Dennis Kamakahi and his son David. "Hello, I am slack head. Five years ago I heard this style of music and it changed my life. I follow it around." Looking at the rest of the audience I realized that he was not unique.

The two musicians took the stage. The son played the Ukulele. The father played slack guitar – an ordinary guitar adjusted down to the singer. When guitars were first left on the islands, the natives did not have an idea of how to properly tune them so they made up their own scales. It has an opaque effect like a puzzle that you have assembled the edges of, but still aren't certain how it fills in the middle.

Dennis and David would introduce each song with a lengthy narrative. The father wore a wide brim hat and looked a decade older than he actually was. He began to explain his extensive mileage, "Do you remember the time I woke you up at two during New Years Eve?"

The son, young enough to not understand that he would one day have his fathers shape, replied, "I thought we were just going to play a couple of tunes. We kept going to dawn."

The father added, "We went to the best barbeque afterwards. They had rice and pork and poi. Sometime you just get what you really needed."

They launched into a breezy instrumental number called "Monterey Sunrise", which they composed that New Year's morning. Their gentle plucking had the same daydream texture as classical music that makes me mentally drift. It was tune that you could listen to in a hammock.

Dennis talked about the tour he had been to on the mainland and mentioned towns as if they were from the most remote part of the world. He started, "We had just been to Santa Cruz," and then pauses for the audience to nod their heads if they had heard of it. "And a couple of weeks we are going to a fund raiser in Petaluma for treating disabilities with horse riding." More nodding.

At some point he had been to Louisiana and fell in love with Cajun music. They played a song called "Dancez Par La Nuit" The son sang and the father added a harmonic rift that sounded like an Arlo Guthrie and plucked unfamiliar chords with the guitar. The menagerie worked. I never would have thought that Hawaiian and Cajun music could be blended, but I know afterwards the barbeque must have been amazing.

We learned about the time Dennis told his son that they were going to play at funeral because he did not want him nervous when he walked out into the Hollywood Bowl. There was the time they met Stevie Wonder and David had no idea who he was. They then launched into an improvised cover of "Sir Duke."

My family had to leave before the second set. My parents were mixed about the show – my mom went to the lobby quickly to buy an album; my father was upset they did not play "Tiny Bubbles."

I realized that we as a family didn't have any two o'clock in the morning drinking stories. I would not want to hear about my father's benders from college any more than I think he would want to hear mine. Our time together was better spent swimming in the afternoons or figuring out where to eat in the evenings. Our discussions wandered somewhere between about the war in Iraq and troubleshooting what two flashing green lights meant on the printer – I didn't solve either.

But except for the time we backed the rental car into some rocks, we had fun. Sometimes my father would spend the day at home and read a mystery novel. Sometimes my mom would get up early to play golf with three strangers. We were like most there – harmonizing at times to our own particular slacked key.

The helicopter

Promises are tricky things. Having never been married, I have never have pledged "for better or for worse." The only times that I have run across this types of duality are grad school and the wildflower triathlon.

I tend to make smaller vows and promises. With some like trying to cut down on Starbucks I don't do a great job, but I do pledge that I want to do some distance event every year.

This year I wanted to warm up for the Keahou Kona triathlon by doing the wildflower triathlon. I joined team and training to keep me fit and ready, and looked forward to the day.

The swim was a scrum - a Euclidian notion held by several in my wave that sometimes the shortest distance is through another swimmer. I had my goggles kicked a couple of times; but by the time we were to the second buoy, the pack had thinned to the point I could concentrate on deep, long strokes.

I cruised through the transition area. My normal bike jersey has three pockets in the back, but the TNT singlet has only one and I did not get hammer gel to a place where I could reach it. My camel back was filled, the shades were on, and it was time to race.

The bike strategy was to spin Lynch Hill, a quick nasty climb, in a granny gear and then cruise the flats at a 165 heart rate. I drank continuously. One of the water bottles that they gave on the course tasted like bleach. I stuck to getting Gatorade from the road crew and drinking from the camel bak. Without a headwind I easily stayed within range.

When I hit the second transition area I looked at my watch and saw that the time was two hours. This is when the thought came that I could finish this race in sub three hours. I don't know why we have an obsession with round numbers - there are lists of things to before you are thirty and certainly the Ten Commandments. Race results have that same glow from sub 3-hour marathons to sub 4-minute miles.

At a 10k I would have to go less than a 10-minute mile over a hilly course in 105 heat. It was time to breakout the game face. This day was going to memorable - a chance to full test my edge. I averaged a 9-minute clip if you include the time I stopped at every water station.

There was a hill on the backside that I promised I would run up for a childhood friend who had passed away earlier in the year. Most of the crowd was smartly walking up and I passed them in blind determination.

Should I have stopped or slowed down? Should I have I realized the heat had taken the most of me at this point? Courage is the well-liked twin of stupidity. I wish I had thought of it as an option.

I was at the top of the hill and still running strong. The last section of the course is gravy - a long descent that you could almost sleep walk through. I had kilometer left to go and looked at my watch that read 2:50. I started a new mantra - I can finish this in 2:55.

2:55, 2:55, 2:55, 2 ...

And then I found myself in a hospital. With cords winding around me it looked like an octopus was trying to mate with my chest.

There is a temperature to thought, and when your body is 102 there isn't much more warmth it could handle. As the IV bag dripped into my body, slowly I started to gain back memories - like whom my parents were. I had no idea about phone numbers, my brothers, what day it was, or that even I had been doing a triathlon.

Slowly details crept in from the nurses and doctors. Heat stroke. Seizure. Helicopter Evac.

My brothers are George and Edward. Still no idea about phone numbers.

The nurse came by again and told me that I had been picked up on the run part of a triathlon.

Completely ignoring the relevancy I asked my first question:

Did I finish?

* * *

First want to say that I am fine. I am deeply embarrassed and frustrated, but emotions can be healed with nice swims in cold waters.

A few IV bags later I was back to a sedated normal. . My stomach is a little queasy, and I have been told to take it easy for a week.

The hard part is that I don't know where I am going from here. I love team in training. I love triathlons. But to get hospitalized twice is foolish. The math major in me should know that if you give 110% then you are only going to make it 90% of the way.

When I am finally healed I will try a new goal, perhaps in a different direction. Still full of passion, I will try this time to be wiser. This I promise.

Em's + Nathan's wedding

Perhaps all weddings should be celebrated in the fog; each has their own haze, a blurry uncertainty of both the event and the future. And yours perched on the California coastline captured nature's metaphor of being on the edge of things.

Getting married next to the ocean also felt familiar because I first met you through water. Not that the chorine swamp of the 24-fitness pool compares to the mischievous Pacific, but I will always remember first seeing you there. It was an odd match – the runner who had just tweaked his knee flapping desperately next to the natural fish with an Australian swimsuit who gracefully cruised the center lane.

The truth of life is that we don't often get to pick whom we swim next to. Sure there are classes and clubs; races and teams – but more often that not it is someone who just happens to be there. You wind up in an anonymous group paced pretty much by your same speed.

I guess what I learned is that you should from time to time say hi to the people one lane over – even if it takes three years and three completely different swim classes. That girl with the R2D2 backpack might just be nutty in a very cool way. I know that the journey afterwards has been so much more rewarding.

There is the exercise part. I have become a better swimmer having joined you for a two-mile open water swimmer over summer, and trans Tomales Bay one over winter. And you have become a better runner to the point that running 14 miles the day before your wedding made some sort of sense – if only to your new triathlon crew.

But more importantly than the miles is the friendship. Life is better when you have birthdays in Inverness, see art in the Headlands, and drink beer on houseboats. We are at our best when we celebrate by the sea.

Your wedding brought the best of that.

Life ahead will have its share of jagged rocks and powerful currents, but if there is anyone I know who can navigate that gracefully it is you. And afterwards when you come in from the daily tides, dried and perhaps still a little tired, I hope you always stand on a grassy hill and look over your shoulder at the wonderment of the horizon.

The Crissy Field Shuffle

At the base of a bridge there is a plaque
That I touch twice before heading back
And as I linger in the salty breeze
I see the city across the swelling seas.

I should make it home before it gets dark
But I rest a while before I embark
There is kid playing with shells all alone
An old man is propping up stones.

Too often the middle chapter disappoints
Not many awards given for mid points
As I return I quicken my stride
To stay with those that run by my side.

Just Maybe, She

I met her at my birthday party as a friend of friend, which was the perfect gift for someone wandering into their mid thirties alone. I wish I could describe her better - how do you capture the way someone walks into a room or a small smile? I need something better than "a total hottie with brains."

Perhaps she has faded from memory a bit because I haven't seen her since. A pediatrician, she lives in San Diego. I boldly got her email address at the end of my party and wrote a few times. She replied once, but I haven't heard back after the last couple of letters. Just maybe, she might simply be too busy with the monster schedule of being a doctor. Just maybe.

Not long after getting that lone letter, our mutual friend asked if she could borrow my parents' place at Inverness for her birthday with the pediatrician coming up for the weekend. This once sounded like a brilliant idea in the same category of getting the cute girl in geometry class to study together. But that wound up being only about side angle side congruent triangles instead of love ones

Our friend is a swimmer on the same tri team as me. I have roped her into doing a few more runs and she lets me know about swims and openings at her boyfriend's art gallery.

She decided she wanted across Tomales Bay and back, which should be slightly less than two miles. I have heard that falling in love is taking a plunge, but I really don't think they mean that literally. I mean two miles in shark-invested, November water is something out the "Princess Bride" not "Love, Actually".

Most of falling love has changed since junior high. Its feel has gone from the instant fluff of wine coolers to the deeper passion of Guinness and the girls aren't half a foot taller than the boys. I still hold on two principles that remain - a) Rock Lobster is a great song to dance to b) the hardest voyage you will ever have to do is to cross the gym and ask someone to dance

Perhaps it was this danger that led to my odd statistic of the summer that I swam from Alcatraz more than I went on dates. But I thought she was worth it. There are people who move you deeply. They are the catalysts of both wars and art, and central to what makes us both inspired and humbled. If only she had written more than once. But maybe, just maybe her computer crashed and she couldn't email.

This is where I insert the training montage. For a few weeks the alarm clock would go off at 5:20 am and I would wonder down the hill for swim classes at the YMCA. These were taught by a nice Russian who would keep barking at me "Grab beach ball. Grab beach ball." as I stroked through the hour session. I still have no idea what this means, but I do know the perfect Christmas gift for him

I dropped eight pounds and shopped for new coats at the Republic of Banana.

I watched reality TV shows for lessons and learned that a) Never trust a shaggy blond hippie called Johnny Fairplay b) Make sure that you get the hot tub moment for your alone time, and c) Life would be much better if you had five people coordinating things for you.

I booked spa treatments for both the swimmer and the pediatrician for this afternoon. Tomorrow the swimmer is bringing up oysters for her birthday and I will take up red wine. I will do my best to keep my shirt tucked in and to try not to laugh through my nose

Ultimately there is a difference between Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho. Don Quixote truly believes that the windmills he charges are dragons. Sancho knows that they are just windmills and it is a lost cause, but figures it would be an adventure anyway. I know that after this weekend I won't have much except a couple of new coats and a little less weight. But on Sunday morning a couple of hours after dawn as I swim across the bay wondering how many other fish there are in the sea, I will think "maybe, just maybe."

Level Eight

I think there is a certain nuttiness in all weddings. The groom might forget that his tux is at his parents; a bridesmaid might learn that tequila is never a good a thing; or it might just be in Cleveland.

In the past for the morning of a wedding I would usually have only three questions – where did I put my keys, is there a good dry cleaner nearby, and did my family find out. But times have changed and I now I get the question "do you want to do the 10 mile guy run or the 5 mile chick run?"

The second one was billed as a level-two difficulty level and level-eight view and was a short drive from Calistoga, a town designed by Mark Twain for the straight eye. There a rows of little homes that still look like Bartles and James would come off of the porch only this time they would be selling mud bathes instead of wine coolers. It is a far more of a chick's run kind of place. When staying at the roman spa I decided to do what the Romans would and went for the five miler.

The course started near a creak and made its way up a hill on a dusty trail. Supposedly there were red woods, but as the trail continued to get stepper and steeper the only thing I wondered about was how was this exactly a two? Was the next entry in the book – Everest level four? The view was gorgeous though. The trail ended at coyote peak, a small rocky out cropping where you could see down through the valley. We sweaty few paused there for a moment perhaps releasing that after so many early morning jaunts, Sonoma bike rides, and arch rock runs, that the next time we would exercise together Lisa would have a new last name.

Then we made our way back down the hill and tried to avoid the roots and rocks on the trail that felt less sturdier than we came up it. We joked about the dangers of Lisa twisting something, but I thought she would have a matching white splint stashed away because every other detail about the wedding was so well planned.

The ceremony and reception wandered through the boundary of effortless and magical. Under a scorching sun, pre wedding lemonade just seemed to appear. We had leaf shape fans for programs, wooden umbrellas to block the light, and small stones to tell us where we would sit. It seemed to be incredibly lucky, but I know somewhere there is a very large binder with all of this stored.

The band rocked. I don't know whether they grooved off the crowd or the crowd just melted over them. I believe that life is better with a great horn section. Theirs would divide up and march down the aisles for a stereo affect that would break an audio salesman heart. The evening built and built until I found myself more drenched from dancing than I did from running. And then came Cedric's love train cigar salsa line. The place shook. I think we cheered the band into an extra set, and I know we should also do the same for our hosts.

And so I want to say thanks so much for a great weekend. My wedding hope is that you continue to find music all around you. And my wedding wish is that you go through life with great friends on a trail that is level-two difficulty and a level-eight view.

Chasing Spidey

This weekend I did another run. The official name of the event isn't the tourist shuffle, but the route does go from fisherman's wharf across the golden gate bridge and back. It is a distance that you do have to train for, but can also go to Oktoberfest the day before. In my view of hell the devil does not play the fiddle but the accordion.

The race started a few ticks after dawn as a mobile mosh pit; the narrow course barely fit the sneaker wearing hordes. After a few minutes the crowd thinned out and that was when I found myself running with a small pack that had my pace. There was a large guy wearing a belt with six goo bottles attached like he was a plumber, two cute girls with different styles of jog bras, and a guying wearing a Spiderman outfit.

Halloween is a year round celebration in California. You know you live in a nutty state when Northern Californians were the ones that didn't vote for the aging action star. I am working on the theory that Southern California must have much better weed.

We cruised along the northern edge of the city technically called the Marina but is actually affinity housing for peroxide blonds with expensive wardrobes. Most of them would still sleep for a few hours more before going to Starbucks or the Grove.

I decided that somewhere on my list of great exercise ambitions was to beat the arachnid.

Spidey wasn't backing down. I could make a little ground on him when he had to lift his mask up to get cyto max at water stops, but he kept on prancing with his spidery strength.

The thing is that if you run next to someone wearing a costume everyone along the course will point that out to you. All I heard besides sea gulls were cheers of "go Spiderman."


Throughout Spidey's career he has beaten among others Dr. Octopus, the Green Goblin, and Kingpin. But he has never encountered the obstacle that cause Lance Armstrong to quit a few laps early – San Francisco hills. New York might be great if you like baseball or Carrie Bradshaw, but San Francisco does wonders to your quads.

When we hit the last long flat I took off and never saw web crusader again. Even at the after race expo as I wondered if the booth for running massage should somehow be combined with the booth with the girls from the new Hooters, I couldn't see him. I guess he had gone back to being to Peter Parker.

I think competition can sometimes bring out the best us (unless you are giants, cubs, or red socks fan). Where would literature be with out the old man and the sea, or Ahab and his whale? Without Nobel prizes how would I hear about so many authors from around the world?

And so whether your next great event is running with the bulls in Spain or just running to video store to rent "Finding Nemo" try to pass the person next to you. Unless, of course, he is wearing a Flash costume.

Click to see map from 2005.