26 miles back to the barns

It was the font of the street signs that reminded me I was back in Santa Barbara. It is a curvy one with a yellow color that seems appropriate for Katy Perry’s hometown. Even in November there was a warmth to the place; the scent of eucalyptus mixed with sea breeze is a permanent facial to a city which while not always young remains ever a spa.

I tried to explain my best to the woman sitting next to me in the bus that drove us under complete darkness to the starting line how important it was for me to return. 25 years earlier I ran my first marathon as part of my high school bikeathon. A year before the great Hank Dart lead a group of cross country runners along the route. He was the best runner at the school during my tenure, a man who could chew track with a smile, a man who even seemed to like the 800 meters, the second most brutal distance in running. The first, a full marathon, I decided to do after he had graduated and I began leaving the Cate School campus with Diana Froley early one morning. We ran slowly and for what felt like forever until she had the common sense to stop at some parental aid station who questioned where our bikes were. With out really drinking or eating much I continued on, and the last few miles was my first taste of the pain and challenge of true endurance sports. I learned “the talk to your self voice”, the great ally on race day; and also, unfortunately by counter example, the importance of hydration and nutrition.

Sill at 17 If you told me that 25 years later I would still be merely running, I would have been thrilled. But the possibility of doing a marathon would have seemed as silly as saying now that I am going to do one in 2035. 42 was really old then.

The woman on the bus just kept looking at me when I went into long white socks, the big deal of Thatcher dual meets, and oranges for participants. Marathons now are still tough, but they don’t have that absolute edge which existed then. For instance Hank Dart now does ultras (and writes a great blog about running - http://runjunkie.blogspot.com/). Most of my triathlon group from the last decade did an ironman at one point or another. With the right shoes, nutrition, and training program a beginning runner can go the distance in 4-5 months and I have helped coach a few hundred of them over the years. Still your marathon is *yours* especially a big number one like this, and I felt a bit disappointed when she didn’t think I should get the monument I deserved.

Granted I would have to still go the distance, but after doing this in four different decades - 80’s, 90’s, 00’s, and 10’s - I felt I knew what was coming. The race was less scenic than expected. There are some gorgeous water front homes and long stretches of beach near Santa Barbara, but they have the kind of millions that can successfully zone things so that marathons don’t go near them. Instead we spent the first half circling Goleta and the airport as if we were some lost plane. We then switched to a bike path and finally a misplaced hill before descending down to the coast for the last mile.

Given that my training was off - I got sick and could only manage a 16 miler for the long run - I knew this wasn’t the time I could qualify for Boston. I did manage my first evenly split marathon (my first mile was the same pace as my last) which was a first for me. My cruiser gear was true.

Afterwards I went up to my high school’s mesa to look around, and the first thing I noticed was they moved the barns. When I was a kid there, old alums would talk about horses and cold showers, but they had long since been abandoned save for an odd disciplinary repainting. The campus might have had a western toughness at one point but with the gorgeous sunsets over a hazy ocean, it would always bring out the beauty in nature as well as its coarseness. We lived in a country club, and the moving of the barns felt like seeing someone undergo plastic surgery where the mole was moved from one side of the face to another. A pool was put where the old barns were for the sport of water polo. That sport was created my senior year I think mostly so that Joe Ueberroth and Mark Metherell could get varsity letters, and while I vastly admire their idea, to have that be the heart of the campus seems peculiar. I then had a deep flash of worry that I had become the old alum that was now deeply concerned with the barns

I looked around to see any students, but the place was abandoned. I only ran into the head IT person would was happily reconfiguring the network. Running had changed far less than technology the last 25 years. We did not have to worry about who was friends on Facebook, about personal mifi devices to host game parties, or the proper use of Twitter.

Everyone had gone to Thatcher for sports day. It was the big football game, which again is a change since I left. Later that weekend I would learn that Cate has an active Gay and Lesbian society which made me feel that they were emphasizing far more two way playing than when I was there. I have no idea how that would have changed the social status if that existed when we were there: since coming out, Dan Emmett remains one of the coolest kids in the class and Pesco as one of the people who entered a computer contest with me remains one of the nerds. But I do know how much that would have meant for them and I could not be happier for its existence.

Football for me is more of an issue if only that means less runners. I wish there will always be a few awkward but hardy folks who run around Gobernador Canyon Road - kids who dream about hills and spikes and who ponder whether they should have stopped running to spend more time with Diana Froley instead of being alone.

Football I am sure is great for the current legends who play it and for the crowds who cheer its gladiator nature. But I have to wonder if any of the current football team is going to come back in 25 years and explain to someone on a bus about how he is going to take that field once again even if he is upset that they moved the barns.

Stewarts

There are times when life imitates Capra, and I did my best by going to Washington last week. The place is different now: it is more a town of starch shirts and id badges, a city where twenty year olds gossip about fifty years olds as opposed to Los Angeles where the reverse is true. But the late October weather was perfect and with Louise about to start a new job it seemed like the right place for a quick vacation.

Our world is spinning fast these days. We have both left our jobs, but Louise has had the more practical sense to arrive at a new one while I tinker on a few iPhone apps. Our new home is unpacked but unfilled. Our conversations range from the price of one meal in March for our wedding, to the china we will break one piece at a time for the rest of our lives. We have upped our gym memberships to try to compensate for all of the splendid meals (and copious wine) that we have shared while meeting each others friends and families. It is a great life, but a hurried one. We thought going to visit Louise’s brother and best friend would be a good way to get away from Art Center Board meetings and tech support email. We did not realize what we would be missing at home.

The Forty Niners who had been picked by many to win their division were imploding publicly. The Warriors who just got a great free agent remain still the Warriors. The Giants had no all star hitters; their great hopes for the season - Sandoval and Rowland - were in slumps, their infielders were injured, and the roster was starting to resemble a collection of castoffs with shaving allergies. Sure their pitching was good and they had a couple of nice rookies who were going to be great in a couple of years, but the rest of a line up was a patchwork of discards and has beens, placeholders until we could start next season with just maybe an expensive free agent. Granted there are sports movies where the guy picked up from waivers hits home runs to win a pennant, but real life teams with less than average hitting, power, and speed don’t really go anywhere unless something magical happens.

It wasn’t that I stopped following the Giants, but just that they shifted more to background noise. I read about the Red Sox’s crushing the Giants the weekend I dealt with the movers taking everything out of my bachelor apartment except the carpets which desperately needed to be cleaned. I heard that they picked up Cody Ross the day after we had our house warming party with our new grill. Still I worked for the Giants home radio station, KNBR, and enjoyed making a virtual Kruk and Kuip. But watching the great Lincecum fall apart in August as the Giants drifted ten games back of the Padres I was resigned that this team was going to be like the others of my lifetime, like all the others that have ever played in San Francisco.

But then again, there are times when life imitates Capra, when a ball hits the top of the centerfield fence and bounces back, when a 21 year old rookie can pitch eight scoreless innings in a World Series game, when a bed headed savant can do it for 21 innings, when a black bearded reliever can make the Beach Boys have the sane Brian Wilson, and when a rookie catcher can manage four aces and hit clean up. Actually the last one never happened before, but just maybe it could.

We had to watch. Not just Louise and myself, but the entire city needed these guys. It was not just that we seem perched on a midterm slaughter by tea parties, nor the collective need for mass karaoke of Journey and Huey Lewis songs, nor the excuse for men to wear thongs since Glee had just stolen Rocky Horror, nor the eight year drought since any Bay Area team had been in a championship game. We needed a world of possibilities and rooting for a group that seemed three short of a Lee Marvin ensemble was too much fun not to do.

In a way watching the games in Washington DC felt more like going back to the Candlestick days when the crowds were a little more knowledgeable but a bit darker. Giants fans aren’t bitter and mean like Phillies ones or bitter and self absorbed like pre 2004 Red Sox, but we are bitter. 2002 scarred us deeply and it seemed like half of our conversations were about when the Giants were going to implode. It was old school Giants fandom, and we started the series by drinking 32 oz Sierra Nevada beers because we knew we wanted to be anesthetized for when the pain came.

We kept waiting.

In the meantime besides the main goal of visiting and commiserating with friends, the thing that Louise and I wanted to do on our Washington trip was see the other Stewart, Jon. He and his cohort, Colbert, planned a rally that was the reverse of most concerts, a rally when music was a long opening act for the comedians. Neither the city nor the rally was organized enough for the masses that came. The metro could not handle the numbers; the sound system did not work for most of the crowd. I began to wonder why exactly I was rallying for sanity or to keep fear alive.

Because in this last weeks (and perhaps this last year) the world has been a bit crazy. Castoffs have become heros. A forty year old found a spouse (and clean carpets). A city found a reason to cheer. We could sometime soon have a parade down Market Street and another flag flapping above China Basin. The party in this city would be insane, and who would want to rally against that?

Sometimes, indeed, it is a wonderful life.

Richmond

For the first half I did not understand the rules of Roller Derby. Granted they were printed on the back of the program just past the page where the Richmond Wrecking Belles had their profile pictures along with stage names like Astronaughty or Velteen Savage; a collection of puns reserved for a cappella groups and porn stars. In a way, not knowing the rules was almost better because it left more of an artistic impression that a fretting about the the consequences, like listening to a band do a new song with familiar rifts but different lyrics.

There is a similarity to auto racing in that the girls circle a track. But if in auto racing you wait for the crashes in between long stretches of laps, in roller derby you wait for someone to break through all of the crashes and skate free. This sport is a traffic jam of elbows and asses and while the tournament was being played at the edge of the San Francisco Marina the players were far different than the blond latte drinkers of the 94123. I have no idea whether all of the tattoos were to cover the bruises or extend them. There is a toughness to the sport, but somehow if it were played by men it would almost be too big. You need a flow to make it work, a grace of progress, and for the most part men just don’t dance as well.

I did finally read the rules for the second half and basically there are five players on a team - a pivot, three blockers, and a jammer (who starts way in the back). Points are scored when a jammer passes people, and as the game progressed you started to recognize them not just by the stars on the helmet but they were the smallest players on the court. The good ones were the ones who possessed not only straight ahead speed but also the ability to cut sideways around the opposition. They were like elves dashing through the forrest. And even though the grace of them was impressive, the player who drew the most of my attention was a blocker named Demanda Riot. She wore white face paint which in a spa would have been called a hydrating mask, in rock it would be called Kiss, and in roller derby it was shear terror. I did manage to see a picture of her afterwards and from the neck up, she actually looked quite similar to the girl I currently am dating. This greatly confused me. How could something that gorgeous be that tough?

From the neck down she is a machine, a mobile wall of rage. I almost wonder what her day job is - somehow I see her in accounts payable beating up on delinquent vendors or perhaps a nanny to some very well behaved children. I hope some of her co workers were in the extremely enthusiastic audience, and just perhaps they will be a little hesitant about sending a nasty email. I, personally, am worried that she is related to the girl I am dating - a family member (some of which I am meeting today for the first time). She might come up to me and say “L tells me you need to clean up your apartment” as she cracks her knuckles and makes me an offer I can’t refuse.

I am going to bring Beatles Rock band with me to Point Richmond where my girlfriend’s mother lives in the thought that singing soothes the wildest of beasts just in case. I do hope I do my best as I wander through a tight knit irish family scrum and that my lateral humor of small asides gets me going forward scoring points as opposed to pushed out into the bleachers. There comes a time when you must go into an unfamiliar pack and hope the best. Even if you aren’t exactly sure what the rules are.

If I sang out of tune

The Beatles never made it to their thirties. Individually, of course, they all went their separate ways of instant karma, traveling willburies, pizza hut commercials, and one legged wives. But for a group that claimed that they were bigger than Jesus, they didn’t last as long. The Beatles are frozen at the age of mirth much like the wax replicants of themselves in Madame Tussauds’ museum.

Granted your twenties is a pretty good time to be stuck in (especially if you are selling out Shea Stadium), but what it gains in earnest it loses in complexity. Only someone who has never had a mortgage thinks that all you need is love. Perhaps this is why several serious attempts to extend the art of the Beatles (the twin disastrous movies of “St. Peppers Loney Hearts Club Band” and “Across the Universe” come to mind), fail in the way that a 200 page dissertation on Shakespeare’s comedies could: sometimes they miss the joke.

The arc of the Beatles are kids learning to play. They are octopus gardeners, submarine captains, and occasionally walruses - which while certainly makes them one of the most aquatic referenced bands, also makes them whimiscal. It is that great unfiltered joy that comes across in Beatles Rockband, a new game in which members can play plastic insrtuments by drumming or strumming as colored notes come from the top of the screen. The game has flickers of animation of the characters, haircut montages if you will. It gives only a hint that you might be in Liverpool or Japan before the song starts and the lights tumble suggesting the kick drum or a bass rift. It is more amuse buche than even an appetizer , but the quick taste is more than enough to give the sense of thousands of adoring fans.

I had a couple of college buddies and the girl whom I am currently smitten by (something in the way she moves strikes me like no other), come over last night and we did our best to go through the catalogue. We wrote paperbacks, traveled the USSR, and played homage to the taxman. The professional musician among us made it to hard guitar, while my sloppy drumming froze us out more than once. It was a good excuse to get the group together. My college roommate came and I hadn’t seen him (before last month) since we graduated.

Between the sessions we talked politics and careers. We discussed about teaching children about art, and then how the US government banned war photography. Both notions of the roll of art in society were far more important than our little plucking, but we returned ever so often to try another song with another laugh.

In the end I think it was good for a few forty somethings (and one thirty something) to pretend to be in their twenties. We briefly escaped the world of job interviews, planning meetings, and prostate checks. On most days minor issues rains down on our lives (the dreadful times of insomnia, commuting, or back pain). But on one septembers evening we traded those hobgoblins of existence for a few great songs and some colored lights pouring down from the sky like they were diamonds. I got by with a little help.

Burning Man

Watch the video

If you travel to the northern hemisphere in early September you will find the mating season of spotted eagle rays in the waters Maui. The high cartilage fish glide in packs off of Black Rock and seem to glance sideways with bulging eyes as they flap beneath unsuspecting tourists. Far away in the dessert of Nevada a humans performed their own mating ritual called Burning Man which had perhaps less spots but more spinning, glo sticks, and hallucinogens. And while the chemicals of Nevada are mostly synthetic, the drugs of the deep blue waters of Maui are the hormones of adrenaline and testosterone.

It takes this kind of blend to venture across the channel from Lanai to Maui, for the first weekend in September is also the Maui Channel Swim, a nine mile race braved by either big shoulder soloists or six person relays. Our team from Tamarama, the Mai Tides, was intimidated by the crowd at the orientation meeting the night before. Someone whispered about a person sharing our table "wasn't she in the Olympics?" Somebody else was impressed with the speedos of some men showering after having just come in from the ocean, and in the end it looked like the entire group could have been underwear models if they weren't swimming thousands of meters a day.

We woke early on race day and met our catamaran and crew in front of the Ka'anapali Beach Hotel where the race finishes. The winds kept increasing as we voyaged across to the start on Lanai and soon the breeze was knocking off the top of the waves leaving patches of white foam to bob up and down in the ever larger swells. It was going to be a long day.

Our boat was a little slow in crossing the conditions but our lead swimmer was quite thrilled to hitch a ride in with one of the jet ski patrol men. Safety men are appreciated everywhere even if their uniform is a life preserve instead of a fire suit. The rest waited on the ship as we watched her join hands with the entire starting line participants as a small prayer was given to the sea the way the Greeks gave offerings to Poseidon. The horn then blasted and the race began.

Each of us on the boat looked anxiously to see if we could spot her among the flotilla of watercraft. Every team has its own vessel and there didn't seem to be any ships left in Maui to charter even if someone would want to go out on such a blistering day. Swimmer by swimmer past the catamaran until at last we found ourselves in the place that we would spend the day: towards the back.

It is true that some of our stronger swimmers made progress against a blue roofed boat and also a pair of Canadian solo swimmers, but these gains would be difficult to maintain.

There is a Kafkaesque property of distance swimming in which all of the splashing and pulling seems to lead nowhere. Late in the race one of our best swimmers was grinding his fastest against the current in his ten minute relay leg only to make scant progress towards an anchored boat. Our captain muttered that he had to put the catamaran in reverse to pace with him. The day was spent trying to find the right gear.

Sometime after the first leg of our rotation (a thirty minute session as opposed to the ten minute ones that would follow), a person came up with a notion that if we weren't going to establish physical supremacy against the ocean we could at least go for a more artistic approach. The phrase "third leg naked" was gossiped around the boat. Could you do something like that during the race? Would we turn off the video camera? Does water make things look bigger or smaller? How would we flap on the ladder after we were done? These questions ricocheted around as we rocked ever so slowly towards Maui.

When the third leg arrived, the bravest of us shed everything in perhaps the hope that sea nymphs would make him faster. None arrived, but as the third bare swimmer was cheered by the boat a water safety jet skier came over to examine the noise only to laugh before disappearing back to the more areodymanic swimmers.

It was in the end an artistic statement, though in retrospect it would have made a bit more sense if we had applied sunscreen before wandering in. Common sense and planning weren't our strong suits and a few of us suffered from too little zinc, water, or dramamine. The race took on the shape of a cousin's wedding which while quite wonderful at first need a desperate sense of ending by its seventh hour. We were drained.

Eventually we made it to the red buoy we needed to keep on our right shoulder before hitting the beach. Three of us swam in and rushed up the finish line. The others helped packed up the boat first forgetting the large blue Tamarama flag and then later the victory party tickets.

Our own victory was smaller than the lengthly banquet speeches (though the winning team gave us a thanks since the second place swimmer had initially thought our catamaran was his). Our prize was having spent a great day in best of waters with the kindest of company as sun drenched and satisfied as the spotted eagle rays whose waters we borrowed.

A Minute

George Rowe’s bib finished the Falmouth Road on Sunday. He ran in a time of 52:28 which was quite good considering he had died a few months earlier. As for the living, he would have been 8th in his age group (men 60-69), a unsuspecting minute behind the legendary Bill Rogers. In an ideal world there would be no camera pictures of the journey nor rankings on a website.

It is, of course, illegal to transfer bibs even to a nephew who wanted to run in his uncle’s posthumous honor. That nephew with George and the rest of his family watched the Falmouth Road Race over the years as it went from a contest between two bars to one of the premier eastern runs. He even wrote a short piece about his mother’s (George’s sister) voyage at the ancient age of 37. They watched Bill Rogers when he was young as he would run by Church Street. They saw Frank Shorter and Alberto Salazar. They saw the rebirth of running.

The legends still come back to the race - Joan Benoit stayed with George Rowe a few times before doing the Falmouth Road Race herself, and this year’s african winners looked as fleet as usual. But the race remains more about family lore. A new set of grandkids watched their parents try the thing only to wind up with the same set of ice bags and bandages that they got themselves from to kick a can or capture a flag. The summer was full of the lightly infirmed; bruises are the perpetual souvenirs of summer.

The day after the race, the nephew took George Rowe’s grand children on their first distance swim just off shore where the runners traveled. It was the first time that the kids had jumped off of the dock and were a little surprised that you could actually swim in the ocean. “But there is fish and seaweed” they protested. They weren’t natural at it - the grace of swimming comes from repetition - but I would like to think it gave them the taste about going far, how a journey can seem brilliant at first, foolish towards the middle, and finally satisfyingly draining at the end, how worse conditions can mean better stories, and how the best adventures are the ones shared. An athletic life can be a long thing, and my hope is that perhaps one of them will come back sixty years from now and run their own race while the world cheers. And that they will be quite pleased from finishing a minute behind a legend of their own.

An unexpected pause

My only complaint of the day was that my wet suit was too tight. I like to think that in the years since I started doing distance swims that perhaps it was the suit that might have shrunk, but I know that is I who have grown. The suit stays dry for most of the year except for a few summer races. It is in remarkably good shape - the Team in Training logo on the front is still bright and shows little signs of weather, which makes it dissimilar from the person who wears it.

A decade has passed since I went to my first information session to learn about Team in Training, a program that prepares novice athletes for endurance events while getting them to raise funds for cancer research. I have gone to Alaska and Hawaii with them. On good days I have ridden my bike or glided on my skis. On a particular bad one I flew out in a helicopter. I have returned every year since 1999 to participate and lately to coach what seems to be perpetually younger people. But that is the same illusion as the wet suit one. The team of marathon runners, humbled by physics of aging knees, is always filled with mostly late twenties and early thirties folk. I am the one drifting away from that mark.

When I arrived at the parking lot of Sports Basement, a new team was beginning to prepare for the Honolulu marathon, the same race I did in 1999. I went over to say hello to a few of the coaches I knew before turning towards the Roper Invitational swim registration. A crowd of much older swimmers (the average age seemed to be in the late forties while most of the race staff was older than that) hung around to be body marked and informed of the tides underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. While not as young, the crowd was definitely strong. On the ferry out in to the Pacific ocean I learned about tales of ironman triathlons and death ride centuries.

I did chat with a nice couple from England and before I started give them too many tips on how to swim towards Marin I found out that they had each swam the 20 some miles from Catalina to California the week before. The week prior to that the gentleman had swum the English Channel and was being hosted by a woman who swam that straight nine years ago. I am fairly certain that ten years ago I was not expecting such company.

We each went to our separate ends of the boat to do a mass jump when the horn sounded. There was an unexpected pause, a brief timeout before the realization that the race had actually started. We then jumped into the Pacific.

I did my best to work on the rhythm of distance. The pack of swimmers was mostly in front of me and I drafted while I could. I flipped on my back to sight against the underbelly of the Golden Gate bridge and then returned back to the long strokes.

A few hundred yards later, at the middle of the race I came across the same nice British couple and their American host. They were taking photographs of each other.

I had a decade of swim times, t-shirts, and towels and the decision whether I wanted to race or linger in the bay which three swimmers and laugh a little was remarkably easy. I asked them if they wanted a photograph of themselves and they kindly returned the favor.

The result was better than I expected. Water droplets blur parts of the shot, but you can see the ferry that we jumped from and the path of our journey. The bridge hoovers above and I have a goofy smile from being at peace in the middle of a choppy sea.

After ten years maybe you earn a bit of a break. Maybe it was time for an unexpected pause, a great way to celebrate a decade and reflect back toward the distances traveled if only by memory instead of photographs. It was nice to share the drift , because some of the nice parts of exercise are the people you meet along the way.

But this can last only so long because eventually the cold of the water catches up with you and the tides must be obeyed.

I took in another look and then I wanted to thank the English couple. They, like many of the great aquatic wonders I have seen in my time in the sea, were speeding away in gorgeous effortless strokes as if they possessed a deep sense of porpoise.

The Road to California

I saw the announcement in the way that news travels these days, on Facebook. No longer are notices done in calligraphy but instead our thoughts, hopes, and milestones are flung in 140 letter missives into cyberspace which in 2009 seems less like a matrix as it did in 1999 and more like a great pond where these ripples collide and wash up on the shores of people who can be distant not just in terms of physical location but also in the timeline of our lives. Email has become a reality, but long attention spans or delivery times seem to be endangered.

My cousin, Lexy, was engaged.

It was a happy moment, and the further good news was that she was coming out to San Francisco for the week with her fiancé.

She had moved to San Francisco a decade ago and lived first at my parent’s place and then in one of my father’s apartments. He would drive her to work, a journey that consisted of swerving around corners and swearing at Asian drivers. When they arrived downtown he would get a latte which she felt she didn’t need after the adrenaline rush. I like to think that these drives captured my father’s duality - deep family kindness combined with a Republican sense of responsibility. I don’t think that he ever was politically correct - he still thinks it is okay to make fun of germans even though WW II is over - but he loved giving advice to the daughter he never had even if it sounded like it was from a 1955 public service film.

She moved back to New Hampshire a few years ago. It was going to be good to see her again, and I asked the family if we could do a get together for dinner. The only tricky part was that we were worried what my father might say since while his driving was still mostly in the center of the lane his politics had shifted a little more to the right where he remains the possible last supporter of Bush in his zip code. All of which would have been fine expect that instead of Lexy’s fiancé being named Victor she was called Victoria.

My cousin hadn’t left California with such an announced disposition. Her boyfriends never seemed to be great matches: their egos tended to be as large as her beauty. Her best companion was her dog.

When Lexy wrote back she mentioned that she was nervous about meeting my father for the first time since coming out, and I can only imagine the courage it must take to return to your family after doing something that you know wasn’t what they wanted.

We ordered upscale pizza from a shop on my street and brought out as many bottles of wine as we could find. My brother made it over with his wife and two daughters. My nieces played on my parents carpet while the rest of us nervously glanced around. We started with the bottle of red.

I heard a knock at the door and opened it to Lexy and Victoria. They came in and after getting a couple of slices of pizza that had broccolini (a vegetable that has migrated from garnish to ingredient) on it, we all sat down and did our best at conversation.

There were a few good rifts. Victoria is a landscape gardener (something that my mom enjoys) and the two of them want to buy real estate (something my father loves to scheme). Lexy was the one who asked Victoria out at a dance, yet Victoria was the one who proposed on a dock on a bay. They smiled and everyone drank.

Lexy said how much she missed California, and my father said how he missed the drives with her. It wasn’t a time to explore the depths of their dual nature - how they both have parts that swerve around society and parts that care deeply about love ones. But it was a time of welcoming and beginnings. My family grew not just in numbers this past week, but also at a small level of acceptance.

12 Minutes

I don’t look like a runner. Short and with a slight pot belly, I look more like a sit com next door neighbor or the guy from purchasing than anything else. It is part of the reason that for the past year my friends have been setting me up with women older than I am as opposed to 10 years younger which my brother gets or seven years which is what my dad married. My friends mean well and describe the setups as “close to my age” in the same sort of way that the Titanic came “close” to missing the iceberg.

Over the weekend the guy at the store, Sports Authority, didn’t really believe me either. A little early for a friends birthday in Fremont, I went to the store to waste a few minutes and headed over to the treadmill department to check out the merchandize. After about twelve minutes a super skinny sales clerk came over and asked if I needed any help.

I mentioned that most of the machines only go up to 10 miles an hour and I was wondering if he had anything faster.

He looked at me with that disdain that is reserved for the rabbit in the Trix commercial or the that French have for Americans everywhere. “Silly, pudgy forty year old” I could see him think before saying, “you don’t really need more than 10 miles an hour.”

But I did.

I have been doing speed work practices the last two weeks and was feeling good about myself until my brother (the same one who just dumped a gorgeous Princeton doctor because at six years younger than him she was too old for him) mentioned that when he was on varsity soccer they had to break 12 minutes for a two mile time trial. I would have to shave about ten seconds to pull that off but needed a treadmill that does 10.1 miles an hour ~ 5:56 minute miles.

My gym has that machine. It is on the lower of the two floors, the one that has the yoga equipment and the zen fountain. The upper floor has the weights, the mirrors, and the attitude. The lower floor folk look they want to apologize for being there. My machine was the second from the right.

I headed down there for my twelve sweaty minutes, a title that I think would also work for a porn film or the out takes from the Watergate tapes.

Speed is one of the first things to go. It is brutal because it can be measured; you know what you did last week or last year and more often than not you won’t live up to that younger version of yourself. As we age we get athletic cunning, the ability to pick our spots. Marathons are about consistent training and then during the race seeing what the day gives you. Something will inevitably go wrong, but the test of a good runner is how he adjusts. To a large extent it is more important to have a marathon race strategy than a time goal. If the day isn’t there you need to learn to be happy with the results.

There is nothing brilliant about speed work. You just set the dial to 10.1 and suffer. Normally I have rambling thoughts as I exercise but as I pounded away on the otherwise quiet yoga floor I only had two. For the first three minutes the thought was that this was really fast and for the last nine it was that I should really quit.

Neither of the two women who were working with the 5 pound dumbbells looked over when I raised my hands at the finish. There were no cheers, no victory medal. no race t-shirt (which I really could have used given the sweaty mess I was at the end).

Some of the best moments are the quiet victories that you have for yourself, but after posting the victory status on Facebook a bunch of friends wrote back in congratulations. It meant the world to me.

So many of them are teetering on their forties and trying to live up to their expectations as reality dashes our better expectations.

Managing your friends expectations is a tricky, art and I do need to be careful about not casually hurting mine anymore than I was hurt when somebody set me up with a friend who was pregnant with her dead boyfriend’s child. I need to learn to forgive a little since after all she was rather close to not being pregnant.

Still there is something great about sharing an achievement even if it is not posting how my single status is changed or a photo that makes me look thinner than I am. I do know that not looking like a runner doesn’t mean I shouldn’t run. We need our little victories, our times when we beat the clock just once more. Twelve sweaty minutes doesn’t counteract 40 years of living or 25 years of trying to find a soul mate, but for a brief time on the yoga floor I was young again even if the only thoughts I had was how fast this goes and how much it hurts.

Happy Days and Sad Partings

I like to think that if we are what we eat, then we dream what we read. Our word diets contain the same food groups of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates in the corresponding mental mush of work emails, Facebook status updates, and (if we are lucky) the occasional well written article. The past few weeks some of the better writers I mentally chew on pronounced their joy of the Kindle. Amazon recently extended their offering to the iPhone. Since I am sort of making my living from that device I thought I would give it a try.

It changes everything.

There is a tendency to inflate the importance of new technology (especially from marketers since hype leads to sales), and often in the aftermath you realize for instance that a new online pet store isn’t going to be revolutionary. But occasionally things do live up to their promise. When I look at the combination of the tech that has come out the last few years - the iPhone and the Kindle - people are going to laugh about how connected we thought we were in the aught ‘s in the same way that we perhaps should have not been so impressed with our dial up speed in 1999, a 30 meg hard drive in 1989, or the Fonz in 1979. Our future selves will look back and laugh at the time when we didn’t carry our entire library around with us. Soon we will.

My stack of books that I really mean to read is being replaced with free downloaded first chapters that I really intend to read. My apartment has enough clutter of hardcover cairns, that the decorating effect alone is worth the price. But what is more impressive is that having Kindle on the iPhone has returned a joy of reading to me. Okay the joy has always been there, but what it adds is the convenience of reading while waiting for a bus or for a table. Reading alone in a restaurant looks quite sad to an outside observer, but if I flip through my cell phone, it could look to that person that I must be really important with tons of messages. I might be as cool as the Fonz (I do share his first name).

Not that there won’t be casualties of my literary shift, and last week I went to see some of the carnage. Stacey’s, the wonderful downtown book store, is closing. It was a technical book lover’s dream. Some of my happiest afternoons when I was fresh out of undergraduate was to go to its other branch in Silicon Valley with a college buddy and pour over new masterworks like Tog on Interface, Inside Mac Volume 1, and Numerical Recipes in C . We would eat cookie dough and drink Mountain Dew beforehand. The sugary jitters perhaps enhanced our eagerness, but the place was a heaven for nerds to like to read.

It closed a while back, but I kept going to the one in San Francisco. I used it as a career barometer; I treated the number of books as votes as to which technologies to explore. Java started with a bang. HTML seeped in. Design Patterns soon got its own case. During the tech boom, the computer section covered almost 2/3rds of the top floor, and while the venture funds provided the cash fuel for these companies, the roadmap/travelogue of where to go and how to build was being sold in places like Stacey’s.

The last few years the size of the computer section shrank. It wasn’t just that people were using less tech (though a good portion of people who actually need to know how to build things started being hired abroad instead of the Bay Area), but the rise of the technical wiki made the information that was published in a book obsolete by the time it hit the bookshelves. Knowledge became more democratic; a great technical writer (like Fred Brooks, Jon Bently, Daiman Conway, and Brian Kernighan) could not keep up with the communities that formed and edited themselves. The writing isn’t nearly as good, but the information is far more vast.

The store was almost empty of books when I visited, and the remaining ones weren’t as tone deaf like for instance Dow 36,000 as random like Good Places to Scuba Dive in Mexico. The bookshelves were for sale as well, and seeing the sturdy wooden cases made me tearful knowing that Stacey’s was elegant all the way down to its bones. Still I didn’t buy any of the shelves. I realized that I don’t have as much of a need for them I used to as anything other than kindling. It is a sad lament but comes with an awareness that I do need to keep up with a changing world even if that means I can't go to my favorite store to figure out how.

Watchmen

February is a dreary month, and I decided to enact my own cultural stimulus package by purchasing a platinum membership to the Cartoon Art Museum which included a ticket to the Watchmen premier and by taking a new class at BATS called Improvisation for Dating. I wish instead they had a class called Dating for Improvisers.

Granted I wasn’t expecting any dating opportunities from going to the Watchmen premier. My motivation for that was pleasing the 18 year old version of myself by seeing the favorite thing I read at the time. There was a thematic parallel of the novel which is about heroes in their late thirties/early forties who are nostalgic for their youth but are coping in a world that is cratering and my own, even if I am not radioactive and rarely encounter psychic giant squids. One of the leads in the Watchmen has a potbelly and in the middle of the book awkwardly tries to make out with another superhero on the couch in his messy apartment. It was a moment that felt true, because while the first time with anyone has the delight of discovery, there usually is also the difficulty of trying to figure out the mutual mechanics. The good news for all is that they eventually did while at the same time accidentally set off the flamethrower in the owl hovercraft.

In Improvisation for Dating, we didn’t get as far as doing our own love with a flamethrower scenes. Mostly the class was about learning to listen to each other, respond positively, and practice to fail gracefully. I like to think we were our own band of super heroes weighed down by our personal kryptonite whether it be an icy disposition, small stature, or a weakness for investment bankers/actors - folks who use entirely too much hair product. It is not that we will ever get around our flaws, but we can learn to forgive ourselves and try to appreciate the best in others.

We talked about status and how in dating that you wanted to at least match your partner. Low status, with its slouches and self deprecating humor, at times is quite funny, but people are looking to date heroes not sidekicks. We talked about the perfection of Cary Grant, the ideal of being both high status and generous. One should carry themselves as positively as they can while at the same time being kind. There is a fabric of relationships in the world that dating necessarily tugs at. Be responsible.

The flaw in the translation of the Watchmen to the screen is that in trying to get the movie under three hours they had to leave large parts of this fabric out. In both the book and the movie one of the characters meets with a psychologist to go over some rather vast issues. The difference between the two is that in the book we see the psychologist take that burden home to an unsympathetic wife. Their marriage deteriorates which is a scene I have never seen in a comic. Not that the action isn’t good in the Watchmen, but it is the psychic weight of watching how the ripples of dread can affect makes it a masterpiece. The movie was reduced to an unrelenting id while ignoring its better ego and super ego.

Not that there is anything wrong with an unrelenting id. After all part of the motivation of taking Improvisation for Dating. was to find someone to practice mutual mechanics (with the other part being to find someone to share a laugh on a sunday morning). As I wander through this new month I do realize it will take the deep superpowers of listening attentively, responding positively, and failing gracefully. Who knows - with a little bit of luck then perhaps I will get to the that moment of finding you are meant for somebody without needing a flamethrower or a hovercraft.

Bipartianship

It is another valentines day, the midwinter gasp of optimism. Realizing that I have spent too many of these alone, I decided it was time to change my approach. We are on the tip of a new era, and the time had come to reach out to a group recently rejected, the great karma rebound if you will.

I decided to ask out a Republican.

She was an Ann Coulter type blond with pearly white teeth that are rather sharp. For Halloween last year she dressed as Sarbanes Oxley, because she figured that would really scare people. She is now a banker in between investments, a growing group that threatens to bring the rest of the country into its vortex. My hope was that in her season of waiting for the return of the capital markets she would let love trickle down.

Even though she is much younger than I (a weakness of mine), I knew I had to study to talk to her. Krugman was quite good for economic counterbalance and the words of Andrew Sullivan helped expand my notion of conservatism. During our dinner as I did my best to ignore her racially inappropriate jests, I thought about her at pillow side and whether in the morning she would read the Wall Street Journal in bed. It was a personal stimulus package.

We wandered back to my apartment to watch John Stewart. He made fun of the democrats which she, loved and I enjoyed sharing the warmth of the couch. When the show was over she got up to leave, and we paused for a moment in the hallway.

There is currently a lawsuit about whether a photograph of Obama is art, but I think that misses that his true muse is being a writer. In that quiet moment I wanted to whisper to her his words:

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change. We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come.

We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.

And when I looked at her I wanted to go on that we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in America's story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea.

And it was that moment in the hallway as I stood full of hope and promise that I heard her own three words that have been told for centuries on dates from around the world:

“Let’s be friends.”

Faces in the crowd

Apple just release iPhoto, its standard photo library, and I can testify that the line wasn’t out the door; the mad rush these days are for handheld devices not the programs that get their contents. The nose pierced clerk who slimness resembled that of an iPhone reassured me that I was the first to get one, She had the bubbly charm of the phone - elegance but brimming self awareness on the boundary of narcism. I while I think she too would handle mutli touch well, as I looked around the store I realized that she is younger than the mac which just turned 25.

The fear that I, even older than the Apple ][ , was exasperated when I went home to use iPhoto for the first time. One of its two main features (the other geo tagging) is that it has face recognition. The program goes through your existing photo library and tries to sort the faces it finds into certain individuals.

There is a theory of animation that it is good that pictures are cartoonish - almost real and we get bothered that it isn’t right, but as an abstraction we are quite fine in knowing that it is a representation - and iPhoto’s face recognition has that creepy almost human feel to it. Using it I could help wonder what iPhoto was thinking as it wandered through my pictures - really he should go to more places than Hawaii? Does he really need to exercise that much? He keeps putting his arm around different girls but they keep looking away? I like to think that iPhoto shares my Woody Allen neurosis.

It certainly was good up to a point - my father gray with glasses was identified correctly in almost every photograph - but the errors were far more fascinating. iPhoto was determined that the larger version of myself was the exact same person as the larger version of my brother; Fat Arthur and Fat Edward were really the same desperately our of shape individuals. it was able to separate the thinner versions of ourselves, but I think it took a small joy in grouping our larger selves. (Somehow I hear it muttering “he should have used a wider angle lens” underneath its electronic breath in the same kind of chirping that R2D2 used when greeting Jabba the hut).

You can click on an individual photograph to say whether it is or is not the person iPhoto thinks it is, and the process becomes a wandering through your history as diets, exercise regimens, gray hair, and pot bellies ebb and flow while the program constructs the platonic you. I had the misfortune of buying a new camera during a rather heavy period and there is an awkwardness in going through all of these photos that reminded me of my college reunion and the pack of high end sorority girls who came back as well.

I was still a math/computer science major on my return which is far better professionally than it is socially. They had such beautiful faces then and even now the remaining hints of prettiness were enough for iPhoto to classify them. But I realize that I enjoy far more the collection of friends that I kept over the years and watching us go through bike rides, weddings, baby showers, and new years parties offset my own self characterization, I felt as I kept wandering through the screens that I was watching us not so much age as live.

In the end I think we are the sum of the smiles we share. And it only cost me $79.00 to have this sorted out.

Janus

The Roman God Janus had faces on both sides of his head, a precursor to a current flight commercial and investment bankers everywhere. He did managed to get a month named after which was much better than most of his colleagues in part because while Janus must have been a disaster at heading a soccer ball the notion that years start equally by looking forwards and backwards is appealing.

The psychological start of our current year came closer to the Chinese date than the Roman one when a man raised in Hawaii by grandparents of a different pigment repeated faithfully (though at the time not accurately) the oath of the president of the united states. He has spent the last few dates unwinding the various edicts of his predecessor, a man who will be remembered more for the rubble of New York, New Orleans and Baghdad than any achievement he claimed. These edicts are mostly the low hanging fruit of common sense policy - we should give accurate medical advice, we should not torture, we can’t imprison without evidence - that while their return is warmly greeted, it is more amazing how long the bad ideas lasted.

Barack Obama will, of course, have to push into more difficult areas - medical coverage, troop withdrawal, budget management - where any answer will alienate some, but the world now is hopeful that a second age of reason will guide through these choices.

But if to invoke Janus again while one thin visionary is taking over as president another president of a small company in cupertino is taking a leave of absence. Steve Jobs is a hero of mine in the same sort of flawed way that Barry Bonds is. He defined and then redefined modern aesthetic. There are some organizations that seek to lower quality to improve replacement sales (I am looking at you Detroit), but very few that can consistently this that just work better.

I have spent a good portion of last year returning to programming on macintoshes. I fear that I have become conversationally boring sometimes base that I have read so much on only one topic. I do want to return to writing more about runs, about how while I am spending my time moving forward, I, too, need to turn my head and look backwards. It is after all January.

A year almost without words

The holiday season has made me come to terms that the dry cleaner across the street has closed. For the years that I was in banking I would have a shirt rotation where half of my shirts were stored at the cleaners while the other half waited in my closet. There was some management to make sure that there was enough fancy and conservative shirts were in each rotation, and as the seasons shifted sweaters were added to one or the other.

My current gig doesn't require dressy shirts; the attire is programmer casual instead of business. It was a strange shift to dress more casually to work much harder, because when it is just you and another guy working on a project how you look to each other isn't as important. (Granted we are such nerds that we have a hard time remember who brought in which jacket).

The work itself has been great. After two early iphone projects which I am chalking off as a learning experience (and was compensated as such) we settled into pairwise programming. The two of us stare at the same computer screen as he types and I try to provide counter point. 

What began as playing around with stereo configuration protocols - and most of our work feels closer to playing with legos than worrying about third quarter results - and continued by a general progression of feature creep became an iPhone application that lets you play radio from streams around the world. 

Our initial most popular stream was from Hong Kong, and in the past week I have worked on ones from Greece, Canada, England and Denmark. Half of those I have no idea what they are saying, but to hear that chatter and realize that you are building something that lets someone connect to the voices of their home is a good thing. People don't need to know the traffic a half a world away, but to be reminded that the traffic is still their brings a sense of closeness.

I like to think that right now I am in the nostalgia business.

As for the work between listening to the world It isn't a relationship of equals - he is significantly brighter than I am. But what I have learned is that I am a good Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. It is strange place to find yourself in sidekick status, but I guess I have gotten to that point that is better to team up with the right person and going interesting places than wondering brilliantly, but aimlessly in the dark.

I wonder what my shirt think of this. They spend half their life time in the dark of my closet and the other half in the bright, but chemically smelly world of the dry cleaners. Which do they consider home?

I hit an odometer change this year, a marking that half of the rotation is over. It is a tough marker to pass while realizing that half might now be over.

But the other side of that is that my second half could be brighter than the years that came before it, that this half could be the better rotation. It has started as such.

Any Which Way The Wind Blows

[I wrote this a few weeks ago, but given the fragile nature of dating refrained from posting it. In the end I didn't get a green light with the girl down in LA and rather than to try to press to on, I realized it was time to let go.]

If we are meant to circle back on ourselves -- and depending whether you are a buddhist or a bad driver this can happen more often than not -- then sometimes we just might head back to our better times. For me the year that changed everything was when I entered high school. I was a poor student before then, and while the diagnose of dysgraphia (a learning disability that is the inverse of dyslexia: an output problem as opposed to an input one) would make sense years later , without such knowledge I entered that year a little more bruised than one should having been shot down by five eastern boarding schools and regulated to a small school on a hill just south of Santa Barbara. I might have disappeared then too, but a series of lucky things helped me thwart my pathologically bad handwriting and enabled me to begin to achieve good things.

It wasn’t just technology; the place had the right level of caring and flexibility, and there are teachers to whom I am eternally grateful. But if you are someone who has difficulty physically writing, then the word processor seemed liked a true miracle. Sentences could be honed and reworked without having to rewrite every word, and the result was as magical as if the device could measure the heavens themselves.

In the end of the things to be burdened with, I am fortunate that bad hand writing matters little. Still it was probably that dependence on the machine which sent me towards a career in front of a screen either professionally as a programmer or recreationally as an essayist. The hard part with both computer companies and wayward paragraphs is that they are at best ethereal and while they might exist in the real world for brief periods of time they are doomed to disappear.

My career has been haunted by this absence of physical reality as I tried first wounded start ups and then later switched to anesthetized banks. When my last project at Mellon wound up being a two year ordeal that was cancelled, I thought I would try to see if I could make a living from my hobby.

The novel I began, a romantic comedy farce set in San Francisco, was wonderful for the first eighty pages. But as I limped through the next ten I found myself and my characters blocked. The heroine was doomed to stay with the rich boss rather than his poor programming lackey. And while I could come up with ideas like earthquakes that might jolt the relationship a particular direction not much was helping to make the book real. It suffered from a lack of structure, and I tried for a while to place the wordy ameba in a literary bucket.

I failed.

Of the sentences I have written over the years, that was one of the toughest ones to type. I am certain that there a bits and pieces that might be salvageable, but I can’t begin to describe how much I wanted the thing to work as a whole. Sometimes I think that lack of description is the problem.

I wandered into this year as I had that one long ago from high school, a bit more wounded than I thought I should be. I have an odometer change in August and the fear of what that means didn’t make my mood any better.

I had to start again, and the only way I know how to do that is to begin asking around. It is a hard thing to say to folks “hey, my career has spiraled away”; there is an instinct to remain poised. This was perhaps why my little pieces disappeared. I would get brief flashes, but it was hard to put anything structurally together. Hope felt stuck at the bottom of Pandora's box.

And then I got lucky. I am not going to question why because it probably isn’t more than random fluctuations in an expanding universe, but a series of little things all lined themselves once again as if there is a comet the orbits the earth every 23 years that can gravitationally pulls things back into alignment. I needed to run into a friend of my cousins who husband was a programmer, and, at the same time, have another new device that was truly revolutionary.

Hello, iPhone.

My partner is a brilliant programer who about a decade ago helped a couple of guys down the hall from him at Stanford with this little search engine called Google. At the same time as Google was leaving the Farm, he went on to form his own company, wunderground, that supports a linked network of weather stations from across the country. He has a world of data - a collection of radar blasts, cloud formations, temperature read outs, and updating web cams - all of which can be displayed on a map. If there were just a hand held device that could be tethered to internet with a rich graphics library.

Hello, iPhone.

The truth is that I did have to hustle for the job. Like everyone else on this planet I didn’t have any iPhone experience, but my earlier work of patching stock models for a bank didn’t seem entirely transferable. I had to reach out on my own and build something entirely pointless but cool, and I think this is the first step towards any fulfilling idea. I built a small application called Whose Hot that colors the friends in your contact book based upon the temperature of their zip code. It is goofy and technical, and I realize now in the same sort of what that looking at my dysgraphia in retrospect is that I need to exist at that boundary between engineering and whimsy.

The work is hard and elegant. To get the iPhone to dance requires deep coding. It is an event based machine and the bugs are deep and difficult. But I am doing really well at it. To be in that place where you know you are good, to have finally arrived at where you feel you should be after so many years of wandering is a rush of pure joy I have not had in a very long time.

He is brighter than me, and I do my best to keep up. At times it feels like we echo those earlier moments of creation of two guys discussing how to make something in a bicycle shop, liverpool pub, or attached garage. We break things down into parts and then try to figure out what we could build that no one has ever seen. And while it is likely that we will not create the next airplane or “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” we are doing our best to measure the sky with what we can discover. It is pure engineering and it feels wonderful to come to where I was so many years ago.

So it shouldn’t have seemed that strange when another voice from that time came once again. This one was of sorrow. A great friend of mine from high school died in a roadside bomb in Iraq. I hadn’t talked to him since graduation, but he was one of those folks who changed me and I after some airfare haggling I manage to return to say goodbye.

The weekend in off itself was emotionally draining, and while I ran into a good portion of our classmates I was unexpectedly stunned by how beautiful his younger sister had become. We chatted a bit and I am left a little bewildered about what to do next.

On one hand I really don’t want to be the guy who hits on people at a funeral - especially the younger sister of a good friend. It would be nice I had met somebody so many years ago and that we had a collection of fading christmas cards - the early ones with Hawaiian honeymoon sunsets and the later ones with children in our arms - but I have only ever been the recipient of those. Instead I have had to wander through life where my enthusiasm sometimes comes off too needy and my humor too insincere and this a journey you take alone.

And on the other hand, when I looked at her I could see a good life together. It is a strange thing to want when you see somebody, but I have gotten to that point where I really want a normal existence. I want the christmas cards and more importantly the healthy family behind them. With her it would be a good life with I am sure the usual arguments and compromises, but there are far better that getting the unusual arguments and compromises of the women my friends try to set me up with - the over mileage collection of hyper busy lawyers and just last week someone who went to college with his step mom. “She isn’t that much older you,” he told me after I had discovered this during our date. I think I needed to explain my requirement that I was looking for a mother of my children and not one of my own. I wonder if I suffer relationship dysgraphia.

And so I am drawn back to that one woman. We traded a couple of emails and talked on the phone. I am not exactly getting a green light, she lives down in LA, and I don’t know if she is ready to date having just been divorced. I am not giving myself great odds here - they look like deep problems. But just maybe they could be solved with some impressive engineering combined with just a touch of mirth and the luck of the right gravitational pull.

AP Bio

Of all of the numerous activities that are honed and perfected at boarding school, one of the most common, sneaking around, receives the neither accolades of year end medals nor varsity letters. But if it did, I would like to think that Mark Metherell would have been the team captain.

At first it seemed an unlikely hobby for him. Tall, and a likely future in medicine he loved creeping around bushes and hugging up against walls. While most nocturnal explorers tended to be interested in trying to head to the girls’ dorm across campus or a stash of beer on the side of the Mesa, I think he enjoyed the adventure most of all.

The truth is that I joined him only a couple of times, my nature - a short, dark, and cynical runner was different from his disposition of blond, calm, and Christian surfer. But what we had in common, the things that would bind us together as friends senior year, was an appreciation of mirth and AP Biology. The former greatly helped with the later.

Our teacher, Mrs. Powers, as a trained biologist must have loved to experiment, and our year she thought a great research hypothesis to test would be “if I made a bunch of very hormonal teenagers study plants for a couple of months, would their attention span crumble into small wrinkled mendelian peas.” I have over the past decade done a fair amount of endurance sports, but nothing training me quite so well to run up hills than having to go through the various kinds of algae. For a brief moment there was the hope that we would quickly get to trees (not to mention things that might actually move or eat), but this was quickly dashed into a long digression into mosses followed by an even longer one about ferns.

Mark and I, lived two doors apart and were AP bio partners and great friends. The little jokes we had back and forth made the class one of the most enjoyable of the year. One of only three seniors on my hall, we studied late together often and as the homework wound down the conversations would shift into more immediate speculation about the girls in the classl. Afterwards I am sure he sneaked out. I have no idea where.

Perhaps learning about vegetation would have helped him in the career he chose.

He had that duality then of wanting to follow his father into medicine and the need to seize life's experiences. He wasn’t alone in this conflict and as we age the dilemma between family responsibility and career passions loom even larger.

But the difference between him and most of us was that he decided to follow his calling. I shouldn’t have been so surprised when I found out that he became a Navy Seal, but there was a large sense of awe and respect for someone to go and follow his beliefs.

He wrote over a page in my year book (after a long section on how I should be more mellow) the following:

Every man has a destiny and only when you find what you were truly meant to do will you be truly happy. Learn to be quiet, contemplative and to listen. These are some ways to happiness. This is my advice to you!
You are my true friend. Be happy in life and never forget me or the things that I have said. I love you like a brother and will always miss you.
Good bye …
Mark
P.S. Always remember God. For he is the true key.

He told me that I should read it after we left the mesa, and I did on the way home up the California coast. I always thought I would be able to talk to him about it at a reunion, to learn more about how he was doing with his destiny, but he never came back. The best I could was ask Ueberoth who kept in much better touch and he would always say that Mark is doing fine.

I now won’t have the chance.

The emails came yesterday that Mark Metherell died by a roadside bomb in Iraq and I have been in a half daze since.

Despite this weekend’s gorgeous weather ( a rarity for San Francisco) I headed to a museum to gather my thoughts. Mark loved photography and told me how he would love to be a photo journalist. Annie Lebowitiv had an exhibit and all of the images seemed hyper real. She had her nudes, and landscapes, but was her portraits - her ability to capture a soul with lord knows how much chemicals and patience. The exhibit felt the way that news of Mark's passing did: the images were larger than normal, with drama that couldn't possibly be true, but then the realization that yes it was true.

I came back home and hit the internet to see more pictures of Mark l online and while he as aged since our time under that Santa Barbara sun he still had that enormous warm smile. He must had so many great photos of the places he has been, of a family that loved him, of friends to he was dear. His life was hyper real.

He was one of the happiest, kind, passionate people I know.

Mark, I will never forget you.

A Mermaid and Turtles

There are fast things in the sea, and I tried to date one once in a relationship that in the end felt no longer than an ocean wave hurling through space until it reached the first obstacle then crashed in on itself. I met her a year ago on the flight to the Maui Channel Swim, and guessed correctly that she was also a swimmer. Having done the race before that (this is my third time) I explained to her about the sea between Maui and Lanai, how the boats cluster at the start while the first group of swimmers huddle on the beach for a swim prayer, how to site off of the second peak of the west Maui mountains at the start and then eventually aim for a series of hotels just north of Lahaina, and how my band of six swimmers had a pleasant day in the sea. I told her not to worry, that she looked like a pretty strong swimmer, and if she had any concerns or wanted to chat she could contact me, the proud champion of the slow lane at the local ymca masters class.

She waited through all of this with only the occasional sigh and did her best to be polite as I explained (incorrectly again) how to do the halfway to Hawaii game on the airplane flight. She looked over at her friend who had another seat and then rolled her eyes as she came back to me. She wanted to be as gentle as possible and she quietly said that she had soloed the 9.5 mile swim the year before. That was even modest: she had actually won as the first female swimmer with a time faster than our group of six swimmers combined and had earlier that year swum the 28 miles around Manhattan. She was an ex pro triathlete and probably didn't need advice from a guy who still has problems with flip turns.

Sometimes I think that the reason that backstroke is my relative strongest is that I have spent a lifetime practicing backing out of conversational holes.

There are fast things in the sea, and I kicked one the day before the race. Along the Sheraton side of Black Rock I saw a medium size turtle weave through the crowds of parents and their small children, and a high school football team that was spending its preseason getting tanned. Normally the turtles never go to that side (they stay about a third of the way in on the other side of the rock) and I worried that they have run out of food near their home, that the new time share complex had pushed it away, the same way it squeezed the locals off the beach so that they have to do their lulas elsewhere.

I watched this turtle swooped past me with the elegant grace and the occasional paddle. It was meant for the sea and spent its time chewing on things near the reef. I followed the turtle for a while (keeping what I thought was good distance) when all of sudden what felt like a battle cruiser passed by, More of a mythological beast with barnacles attached on its shell and near its eye. the head turtle was bigger than a four person dinner table, and the water rushed around his flapping as if he could almost control the currents. As I turned to get out of the monsters way I gave a quick kick behind me accidentally on the top of the other smaller turtle’s shell. I felt my race karma draining and wasn't sure if the proper penance was once again swimming backstroke to the shore.

To go back to a race that you have done before is a bit like visiting an ex girlfriend. There are the moments of familiar joy followed by the reasons it fell apart. The 2007 Maui Channel swim felt like an unstirred mai tai with the first 2/3 of the race in the gentlest sweet water in the world followed by an undiluted shot of reality. The organizer kindly waited until the last of the 73 boats had made its way to Lanai then waved the green shirt for the minute warning followed by the horn to start the race.

Our first swimmer had a long cadence, and the rest of of the male portion of our team was quite pleased that he had decided to swim next to an all women's team boat. The participants during the race are spaced out far enough that you can't get the voyeuristic glimpse you get from sessions in swim lanes, but instead start to think of the personalities of the other teams based upon the shapes of their boats. There are the fishermen, the pirates, the pluggers, the catamarans, and the smaller dinghy (used to support the solo swimmers). The other boats serve as benchmarks, because out in the middle of the channel you can’t see the progress compared to the distant islands but can grasp how you have gained or lost relative to the USS Minnow.

The women’s team dropped us during the second leg, and we would spend most of our day battling a boat we dubbed the pirates.

Though sea was smooth for the first two rotations, one of the swimmer’s stomach decided to make its own choppiness. She rallied in her times in the water then lay fully drained of fluids in the cabin as the rest of us battled the sea.

For most of the way the water was gentle, and it rocked us with the slight touch that a mother cradles her child to sleep. Our biggest disaster (tiny compared to the year before when our first boat’s engine broke) was that we had left the beer back in the house. The other veteran on the team and I joked that it we would be an hour faster, but the truth was with the much kinder sea we improved by two.

The chop came when we made it past the lee of Molokai, and the slapping did its best to disrupt our rhythm. We had to go back to breathing on the right side, because to use bilateral technique was to taste salt.

We made it back to Ka'anapali, but not before our nemesis pirate ship separated themselves from our competition. To make it easier for our captains return we swam with food and extra clothes in white plastic bags towards the beach and pushed our goods like castaways onto a desert isle. Some of the people on the beach saw us arrive, and after all that sun and sea I didn’t quite have the wit to tell them that we were shooting a scene for “Lost.”

There are faster things than me in the sea, and I saw her again a couple of days later at the local 2.4 mile swim. It was just before the prayer, and she didn’t realize that she was standing next to me. I said hello, and asked her how her team swim did.

“Well,” she replied. “You know, it is the Maui Channel.” We then drifted apart to head towards the starting line. I know I won’t return for her, that we are from two separate worlds and only in a few months in one particular autumn did the ocean hold us together. But I will come back to the channel perhaps to see the whales as they migrate or to apologize to a turtle. There are things faster than me, and I must come back to appreciate the struggle of swimming in their world, that the days spent under starry skies and with good friends are some of my best of the year.

Remember Bill

Perhaps it was a little strange to spend the first day after leaving my job by going to a memorial service for someone I had never met. Maybe sleeping in or going through my tivo recorded list would be more appropriate, but funerals happen at unexpected times, I knew I could make both the service and then go to a wedding that afternoon, and some of the most influential people in your life are the ones you never meet.

Bill Walsh was a childhood hero. Growing up the two mentors I wish I had were Bill and Obi Wan Ken-obi (the Alex Guinness version. The Ewan McGregor one I keep expecting to burst into song). There is a similarity of type between the two; at a deep level I believe that they were intellectual boxers, the ones who survived on their wits but knew how to battle when the time arose. There are the other kinds of fighters, those that use superior strength or unchecked emotion, to their advantage and in a given battle these types can win. A strong punch can triumph over a well thought out one. But I think to have a successful career is to know when to fight, to grasp the rhythm of a battle and set its tone, to understand and maximize the talent you have, to be ruthless in the brief times it is needed, and to be gentle every time else. Bill Walsh did all of these things.

“The Catch” is the “Stairway to Heaven” of football plays in that it is both overplayed and still is impressive. In the history of leaps Dwight Clark floated in the back of the end zone the way that Neil Armstrong did on the moon. The moment has been used extensively as a highlight from pre-game shows to sport drinks commercials. It was the YouTube football moment of the eighties.

Yet to shorten a decade down to a clip is to widdle its importance. A few months ago ESPN Classic replayed the entire game on television, and I was transfixed once again.

In 1982 San Francisco had an inferiority complex. The seventies weren’t kind as the drug use hardened, the Vietnam war raged, the presidency changed from paranoid to ineffective, and this rage now aimless without a fixed or easy concept to rally against (the war) or for (civil rights) manifested itself in the craziness that lead to the assassination of a mayor and soon afterwards the drinking of cool aid in the jungles of Africa.

We also sucked at sports. I don’t know whether as a pacifist city, San Francisco was doomed in a game that used war metaphors, but the Niners were bad not so much in the Charlie Brown sense where the ball is pulled away immediately before being kicked, but more in what used to be the Red Socks Way where the team would do well for most of the season until they would get crushed in the playoffs.

Bill Walsh would change this, but we could hardly expect it at the time. More Odysseus than Hercules he looked less like a classic hero than the tweedy professor who teaches classics. His boxing approach to football wasn’t going for the massive punch, but instead to use a series of dinky passes to grind an opponent. It was a strategy based on adverbs - “consistently” and “eventually” - rather than verbs such as “pound” and “crush”.

This was fine and good for the regular season, and to get a winning record was an achievement for a team that had gone 2-14 a couple of years earlier. But the question remained how would such a thing work against a powerhouse team with superior talent.

Texans breathe football the way that San Franciscans breathe fog. Any place that boasts they have “America’s team” has to have the talent to back the claim, and other than Steelers of Pittsburgh no one was as ferocious in the seventies, the battle orcs of red state America.

The Niners weren’t as talented then. They had a series of cast offs - Fred Dean, Hacksaw Reynolds - a few up and coming youngsters - Ronnie Lott, Dwight Clark - and one quarterback with a soft arm but a steady poise that slipped to the third round. Joe Montana would become one of the greats, but against this Dallas team it looked liked he was going nowhere. With three interceptions in the game, Montana looked mortal.

The local crowd felt it. The announcers kept mentioning it. When the Niners got the ball late in the fourth quarter, my memories stirred that “this was the drive,” but they went three and out. Dallas got the ball back, but a receiver dropped a ball on third down. If he made that catch then perhaps the West Coast Offense doesn’t dominate football strategy for the next twenty years. If he made that catch everything changes. But Dallas punted on fourth down to give the Niners the ball on their own 11 yard line with 4:54 left to go.

At this point watching the game I was ready for the greatest passer in history do his stuff, but what I had forgotten was that Bill Walsh was coaching. The counter puncher had to set up his final blow by doing something quite unexpected: run the football. This seems even more insane in hindsight, but the little runs by Lenvil Elliot, a player who had been cut during preseason, were available. To me, the definition of someone who can successfully do the unexpected, who achieves victory by the unanticipated, is a genius.

Finally the ball got down to the six yard line, and well, you know...

And so it was twenty five years later that I felt I had to go to the funeral. Small and with bad hands I was never going to play football well even on Nintendo. I have seldom had the courage to run when the world thinks pass. But I want to. I needed to say thanks to someone who showed that even the most physical of things can be won on wits.

Leaving Mellon

It was my seventh time doing the swim from Alcatraz, and the third that had a run afterwards. On any Alcatraz swim there is a point (usually about three minutes into the race) where the body goes numb. Perhaps the neurons grow indifferent to the danger and stop sending messages that “this cold water is a bad idea” to the brain so that the body can focus on stroking towards the shore. But what might also be the case is that after a few of these swims, my brain has been numbed to the point of thinking “Alcatraz isn’t really hard at all. It is only an hour swim.” Fear was a great motivator for training and to stop respecting the distance led to a little bit of slacking on my part. My twice a week master classes were reduced to just showing up occasionally to the pool. My series of progressive Aquatic park swims this year became just a single dip on a particular sunny morning. My crafted nutrition plan had been morphed to a couple of beers the night before.

I had no idea how strong my shoulders were, but I felt great going into the race.

The prerace portion of Alcatraz swims have the most nervous collections of athletes I have encountered. There is a constant anxious vibe about the day that causes chatter amongst the participants. Though the Alcatraz Challenge is my favorite of the swims that are held because it does not have the agro triathletes of the other events (something about having a bike brings out the worst of people), it still scares. I tried to my best with my prerace karma and offered a spare set of goggles to someone who had forgotten theirs, joked with a couple of Irishmen about the swim while waiting in line, and sat next to a man from Arkansas as he waved good bye to his indifferent children. The woman next to me on the ferry giggled hysterically

The captain announced that he would take the boat to the lee of the island and what we didn’t realize at the time was he meant that the water was too rough to position the boat normally. This fact became apparent as we hit the water in sets of three. We were push and rolled by the swells. It wasn’t the biggest ocean I have seen (that honor remains with the Maui Channel 2006), but it did feel like we were trying to swim on top of elephants.

I am more of a tug boat than a speed boat, and I did my best to trudge against the waves. This time around I found swimmers near me for most of the race which was unusual because often in the past a kayak would have to come to point me towards the expensive housing that is San Francisco. I don’t know whether this year I had better aim or there were few kayaks but I plodded alone through the waves as I learned how much I really need to respect the Alcatraz swim: one mouthful of water at a time.

Life isn’t sports.

Or if it is then it is the kind far away from Barry Bonds’ pursuit of fame. Sports are hobbies with a bit of health care thrown in. They are the distraction from the rest of our struggles whose score isn’t kept. There aren’t points given for being a good friend or responsible worker. Most of the time we toil anonymously without ever getting a medal for our efforts. But that morning swim wasn’t really about sports either even though I was quite proud of my catching a tattooed man during the run. What I will keep from my seventh crossing is an entirely different thought:

I never saw the body.

There was an ambulance at the finish line, but I assumed it was the usual precaution, the same modern notion that causes three release forms to do any activity, the one that wants not just air bags coming from the front but the sides as well. One of the reasons that we live longer now (other than we are washing ourselves more often) is that we are much more careful. It is easy to be cynical of our nerf like existence; the race t shirt itself mocked the danger with the words “swim or die.”

This was the first time the Alcatraz Challenge had someone in the second category. Sally Lowes of Houston never made it to the shore alive.

I was shocked when I discovered this after going home. Death isn’t what we expect on a Sunday morning. Granted I probably never saw Sally Lowes alive, but there was a part of me that felt it could of. How different was she from the guy who borrowed my goggles or the one from Arkansas with his kids still on the shore? There are the random people of our encounters – the extras in the cinema of our lives – that we catch briefly in a single moment perhaps tying a shoe or giggling loudly and we remember them briefly as the giggler until that moment too fades.

Looking at it now, I don’t just fell I should have respected the race more with both an awareness of the sea could do and the foresight to try to prepare, but I also feel that I should do that for life. It is easy to wander through things half numb to the world.

The race itself isn’t why I have decided to leave my job and spend 9 months trying to write. That decision was made a few weeks ago when the project I was on was canceled. But it does stem from a similar notion that I need to relearn passion again and find warmth as I get rolled by the waves. Because the one truth from yesterday is that there will be a time perhaps distant but perhaps too soon that we aren’t going to reach some shore.