Airborne Migrations

The trip was meant for my mother in law. It went beyond being her 70th birthday to something that motivated her for nearly a year. It was a chance for her to return home, back to the county she came from, to acknowledge those that shared her journey, and for a brief time to get all of her brothers and sisters back together again for a laugh and a pint. It was referred to as “the wedding” since it would be that kind of a gathering with the purpose of celebrating life’s transitions.
But like most weddings, you hardly get to spend time with the bride. My only long conversation with her was when we traveled from the hotel to the airbnb and she refused to believe that google maps had a better understanding of directions than she did. In the end it turns out that she wasn’t Luke Skywalker with the Death Star and perhaps could use a guidance system. She was equally unafraid to give me other guidance about all things Irish as we walked, and such is the relationship between sons and mother in-laws.
I did my best to listen.
For me the trip was more about seeing if we could take two small kids abroad. In particular, it was about David who had never gone out of the country. He was named for his Irish grandfather, and has the same thick hair and curved eyebrows as my mother in law. It was just under forty years since there was a David from the family in Ireland, half of my mother in law’s life.
David lives in a world of super heroes that I am allowed to occasionally visit. What is labeled as five minute super hero stories from a book that is well worn often become 20 minute discussions about who is on each page. He wears as much batman clothes as he can, though I do my best to limit him to only 2-3 pieces at a time. When he got upset, I started to draw super heroes for him to calm him.
The drop-offs at school became David surrounded by five of his friends watching me make sure that Aquaman had an orange shirt and green pants. Accuracy is a very important part of his world of heroes and villains, and so we spent a year making sure that I drew Superman just so (always with a cape) or Batman with a utility belt. It was a pattern of convenience since a drop-off is like defusing a bomb attached not with with a red or green wire, but with an umbilical chord. It worked and we kept going even in Ireland.
We pretended that the Dublin Castle is where Bruce Wayne lived - even though as David’s brother, Edward, pointed out it wasn’t a real castle anymore just a museum. We learned about Brian Boru and Bram Stoker, of the heroes and monsters real and imaginary. We fled the leprechaun museum shortly after the multimedia presentation on Newgrange became too spooky. We built lego ninjas and robots in the hotel. We wandered through a country rich in legends and storytellers, a kingdom of faeries and selkies where the taste of salmon could bring the knowledge of the world, and the entire time David wore his Batman raincoat complete with two pointy ears on the top of the hood worn ever upwards even indoors.
Mythologies can flow both directions across an ocean.
I thought about migrations when we went to Herbert Park, a gem of a park only a few blocks from where David’s grandfather grew up.
On one side of the park is a modern playground with the same safe slides, scoopers, and child screams as in America. On the other is a duck pond surrounded by blooming trees that looks like something Monet would draw, elegant in its silence except for the occasional quack.
I wondered if these birds were descended from the same ones that were here when David’s grandfather was a young boy. Or do these birds migrate from all over only briefly stopping in Dublin. Are some brought over and released? Where do the birds fly?
Ireland, itself, is experiencing its own immigration. None of the workers in the hotel nor the baby sitters for the nights out with the cousins were born in Ireland. The cab drivers complained about the influx of foreign nationals. The aunt who sat next to me during dinner, seemed to have in interest in Donald Trump. Things flow both ways across the ocean.
My mother in law’s father had a stroke much too young. It meant that for each child there was less money, and the distance they traveled from their home in Navan to where they settled, correlates to birth order. The first went to the states, the next London, and so on. The birthday party was a reverse migration; the youngest traveled the least to make it to Trim, but when they all arrived back with the same bushy brown hair, that David also shares, it was quite clear that though they lived in different ponds that they were all of the same feather.
There is no such geography on my father in law side. The pattern is more of doctors and writers; red heads and brunettes.
The writers came in handy for all of the toasts.
The doctors came in handy since the other thing airborne we brought with us was sickness. Everyone except me had ear issues. My wife in particular was off balance enough where I had to go to the pharmacy to pick up medicine only to find that half the store was spray on tans and pregnancy tests. I assume that one leads to another. Our eldest, Edward, was the one who needed the most help since when we arrived at Trim his temperature shot up to 104.5. His fever caused him to scream desperately at night. It was the banshee voice of true horror, and my wife did her best to make him drink ice water to cool him down.
I am still frighten of whatever shook him in the middle of the night and was glad that the fever changed as quickly as the Irish weather.
The week before we left, David changed our drop off routine. He drew a villain for me. It was the Riddler complete with green pants and purple question marks. The face had the eyes in the right place, and there was the slightest of smiles.
My wife told me he had been drawing people all day long and that he was well beyond what was age appropriate. Representational Drawing is supposed to come in much later. There was one article that said that at 3 some kids will be able to draw for 15 minutes at a time, and I wondered about David’s ability to be at the art table for a hour or two.
There is a danger of over extrapolating your child’s abilities. A kick of a soccer ball, doesn’t mean a world cup invitation.
But at the same time, I felt something that I couldn’t help - pride.
When I dropped him off at school the day after our long flight home, he asked me to draw him an Irish Ninja.
I don’t know what he will remember from the trip, but I would like to think that he remembers it as a place of legends and family myths. That he dreams of things that fly whether they are birds, aer lingus airplanes, or Superman. That he looks at all of his great aunts as part of his own tribe. That he felt this was a country worthy of Bruce Wayne.
I asked his brother what was his favorite part of the trip.
He said without hesitation “Burger King”
Sometimes you don’t migrate that far away from home.

Circular Journey

Our first parent teacher conference was a surprise to me. The teacher had mark our eldest son’s report card with such a  consistent score of “average” that it almost felt that the entire thing could have been done over Netflix’s and chardonnay, and when we went to see her the news was much the same. I learned that if you wanted someone to say that your child is brilliant in every way take them to a grandmother; schools are often there to say what isn’t going well.

“He has no real interest in music or art,” she said, which stung a bit. Our youngest loves music especially if it is off the sound track from Zootopia, but our eldest hadn’t sung at home any of the songs he was being shown at school. 

Until one day, he started singing Moonshadow by Cat Stevens. It was only the slightest semblance of a melody, but it was music. I put the song on our home stereo, and slowly we learned the lyrics together. Our youngest also chimed in, and of the handful of words he has two of them are “moon” and “shadow”.

And so we entered into our autumn singing a song about decapitation.

Sometimes it takes a while to get somewhere.

Next week I am returning to the place that I started - 2### Clay Street, San Francisco CA 94115. It is where I came home from the hospital 48 years ago. My parents moved out of the place when I was just a little bit older than David is now. I have no memory of living there, and I know that our memories of Steiner Street will fade from our boys. The stickers of monkeys and elephants that we put up for them will be pealed before the new tenant arrives.  The carpet where they first crawled and later walked isn’t coming with us to clay street. We are leaving the swaddles and swings that soothed them.

The new place has a tiny back yard, and there will be tricycle races and easter egg hunts there. The boys’ room is going to have balloon wallpaper, and the carpets in the new place will get stained just as much as the carpets in the old.

The distance between the two houses is four blocks so the places we eat and shop will be the same. The distance I will have traveled in my life is five feet from the infant’s room to the master bedroom, which I know isn’t very far.

But it has been a circular journey.

One night at the Clay Street house 47 years ago, my parents woke me to watch Neil Armstrong climb down a ladder. Waking an infant is something you are never supposed to do - far better that they can sleep so you can get yours.

It was time to see a man who had travelled farther than any man ever has, a time to watch humanity’s desire to explore the world, a time for parents and a child to share a moment of wonder. My parents still remember the large cardboard box I played with afterwards which I pretended was a rocket. Some houses aren’t forgotten.

And so I am going to return to the place from my distant past, a place where I watched someone walk amongst the shadows of the moon. I am still learning the melody of being a father and a husband, but the lyrics of life sometimes has a familiar refrain.

E & E

It is my son, Edward’s, birthday tomorrow and no longer will my wife and I be able to tell to the random playground parents that we have two under two. The speed of our family creation was a badge given for bravery (and a touch of foolishness).

Instead the birthday marks the transition towards toddler. The age is not referred to as the terrific twos. His disposition is changing from one of needs, such as food and sleep, to one of wants like doors being open or iPads to be held. This past week he has developed a new great want - Elmo.

When I greet him in the morning his first word is Elmo, which has taken over his vocabulary like ‘Aloha’ in Hawaiian.  After I clean his diaper, he says ‘Elmo’. After I give him the milk he says once again ‘Elmo’

He has a small Elmo doll but prefers the world of Elmo literature. If I am to blame for his constant running around, I like to think that his mom gave him his love of books.

In one tale, there are little flaps to be lifted so you can help Elmo find his blanket. In another the flaps are for numbers, letters, shapes, and colors. My son checks each page several times.

My wife and I are a bit worried about traveling some place where we didn’t have a handy Elmo. Her idea was to buy several like the way we bought three shirts for my wedding in case I sweated too much.

I started to look at videos and audiobooks for my son, but I prefer the red headed monster silent.

I know that a year from now he will have new wants, and I think about how much he has changed in the last. A year ago to the day was the first time he started to walk in a way that resembled rugby players after a night at the Tonga Room. He doesn’t stumble as much any more.

Halfway through the year, his brother arrived whom he greeted with tears. He now hugs him every morning and brings him bottles or toys to make him happy. I asked Edward if he wanted to give David the Elmo doll, and Edward replied with his other favorite word ‘mine.’

I think that turning two means that you have so many more flaps in life to look under, so many words and letters to learn, and so many more pages to turn. There are monsters in the world, but some can turn out to be friendly. That streets can be busy, but are safe if we hold hands.

I know that there are green eyed monsters of brotherhood, and for that matter this year will have tantrums with epic choruses. And I hope we weather these well by counting to ten with numbers we have learned from the streets of Sesame.

Life Aquatic

My eldest son, Edward, said his first swear word yesterday. He was, of course, mimicking his father who in a moment of frustration over a spilt mocha on a changing table launched the explicative. In my defense, during the week I take care of the kids during the 6’s of a.m. and p.m. - the twilight between sleep and exhaustion. The mocha is my fuel, my milk drink as opposed to his.

To my son, who has so few words, perhaps the swear could have meant the same thing as “boom” or “uh-oh”. Life with two small children is a series of liquids and spills and there is the never ending clean up of wipes and towels. It has become part of our routine enough that Edward will sometimes grab a towel if he spills something. His favorite person for a while was the trash man.

We have a life aquatic with our heads out of the water barely enough. Parenting is the process of riding the tides of toddler attentions - the fast shifts of the currents of desires.

Edward for the most part has been living well. He has a collection of aunts and grandparents whom I refer to as the mutual admiration society. He has gotten used to having a younger brother in the same sort of way of getting used to eating using a spoon. It isn’t always, and when it doesn’t work out it gets a little messy. But the intention is there.

To get him out of the house away from the newly steam cleaned carpets and couches, he goes to a bevy of activities. He has soccer tots on Mondays, where he insists on stacking cones as opposed to running around them. He goes to Jameroo and Music Together, which are meant to cultivate his artistic side, but wind up being places where he runs around the peace circle screaming. Someday he will do exercise in sports classes and art in art classes, but for right now he explores things impulsively.

On Thursday mornings he goes to swim classes at the JCC. We got our first report card a couple of weeks ago - never too early to start measuring kids in San Francisco. He had top marks in enthusiasm and confidence, but did not fare so well when it came to the section of skills. It looks like it will be a career of venture capitalism.

Not all of the kids in the class are unafraid of the water. Some luckier parents have children with a better sense of danger. There was one girl, Olivia, who would cry the entire class. I would get the updates on Thursday dinners about how everyone was doing. In my mind Olivia was of Russian descent with large eyebrows, and a power set of lungs. She is, in fact, Chinese and didn’t scream as loudly as my imagination. More of a whimper.

I kept asking about swim class over dinners. Did we think the instructor named “Blaze” lived in the Haight or were the rents to high there? Was Edward kicking on his back? Did he put his head underwater? Does Blaze have good earplugs?

The updates kept coming, and one day I got the major news. Olivia had stopped crying during class. Edward had held her hand and made her feel safe in the water. I like to think that with his hand held he could not splash as much either, and that the two of them could start to learn about the aquatic life with a sense of calm.

I then learned that at the next class they had started to kiss. We spent a few weeks of Thursday dinners speculating about the two. About how he would think of his summer romance with his few words of “up” and “down”. Would he grow up to be an olympic swimmer, because he had found true love in a sea of chlorine.

And then yesterday it was broken to me softly. Olivia had spent the entire class with Sebastian who was both blonder and younger than my son. Edward was very troubled that she would not hold his hand anymore and could not understand why she would kiss Sebastian instead of him.

When he came home from class, he took a longer than usual nap. That evening he didn’t pick on his brother except for a few times of pulling his hair.

I was, of course, devastated by the news. How could she I wondered. Was my son just a stepping stone for the shallow end of the pool? You have such little time to give your children the advice they need to handle the world. You won’t be there for all of the heartbreaks. I can only hope that Edward reached down into his small list of words, and after going past things like “apple” and “blue” would come to say what his father told him. 

Shit.

Wear To Now

I was in line at the supermarket and at the counter was Marie Claire magazine with the headline 20 beauty hacks. While normally I would be upset about how badly the word hack is being used - 20 beauty hacks is something a serial killer would do - I was more amazed by how much technology has wandered into lifestyle.  The world’s runways are lit by cell phones.

It is going to get more intrusive.

Two of the biggest tech companies, Apple and Google, over the last year or so have announced their plans for wearable computing. While normally there is convergence in the tech world, this time each has their own idea about how to chain you to their ecosystem.

Google’s is to extend the computer screen to your permanent vision by making the wearable be eyeglasses. Their ideal is the movie Terminator in which given a situation a list of options can appear. The eye glass will know where you are and what you need. The price is that Google gets to know everything about you.

Apple’s is to wrap a pager around your wrist as a watch. Their ideal is Babylon 5 in which everyone communicates by tapping their hand. The watch will monitor your health and ring your friends. The price is that it is going to be expensive.

The differences mirror their approach to mobile apps. Google has built out Android to mimic the flow of webpages being downloaded from the server. Central to its navigation is the back button which is similar to the back button on a web browser. Google wants you to surf ideas. They want you to wander.

Apple wants you to live locally. There isn’t a back button or any distracting widget, there is only the app you are currently in, and they want to make those as powerful as desktop applications. They have added rich database support to locally store your information and deep libraries that take advantage of the phones sensors. Apple’s truth is the bird in the hand, not the cloud. They tend to mess up when they go to the server and the launches of Maps, MobileMe, and Ping were all problematic.

The question for wearables is what do you want to see when.

I do like Apple’s philosophy of self inspection more than Google’s world awareness since I would rather have less intrusion than more. But there those times, say a job interview, where getting the answers you need immediately would be useful. At some level using Google Glass to assist driving would be great, but there is also the danger of paying more attention to an incoming text than a pedestrian. Perhaps Google will figure out the right balance of when to update, but this will take time.

My main issue with watches in general is that I break them all the time; their faces are patchworks of scratches. I go through watches at a far faster rate than glasses. When I purchase a $30 Casio, that doesn’t matter as much, but with these things coming in at over $400 the effect will be brutal

But to be able to signal my wife it is time to leave a party or that I love her could be great. Still we already have our silent language of nods.

I am aware that I am too old for their target audience just as I was too old for text messaging, and that was a decade ago. But I do feel someday soon I will get announcement on a wearable device about a company’s upcoming hackathon. All I will be thinking is that they really meant the word overtime.

The Waves

My son went to the Pacific for the first time near Stinson Beach. He can’t really walk without support, but grasping my fingers he charged right into the sea. He has no notion of swimming or for that matter basic safety. He wanted to dart into the waves, to go into the unknown.

I am job hunting again, a process similar to speed dating but without the intimacy. There is a habit of some shops to try to stump the candidate. They ask about a technical api or some arcane part of language that can be answered, usually, in four minutes in a web search and it is as if their main hiring requirement is to make sure that their programmers will work when the internet goes down. The truth is that when the network goes away everybody goes out for coffee, so the fear is a little misguided.

You can always find something that somebody doesn’t know, and as such that isn’t the mark of a good interviewer. What is more impressive is trying to find out what it is like when someone is over their heads, when they rushed their ocean and the waves were bigger than they were - how do we handle struggle.

I flail most of the time. I want to pretend that I could be calm, that I would handle the crisis with an even demeanor, but the truth is that when things get hard, there is mostly panic. I want to pretend that there isn’t fear, but that is as silly as pretending that the ocean doesn’t exist.

I can sometimes ground myself in my memory - that I have some sense as I tumble about which way is up. I remind myself that I have survived other job hunts and other bad jobs. I remember to breathe.

This time is different. Someone else’s tiny hand holds mine. These days I don’t need a life preserver for myself as much as a raft for my family.

My son has a giggly laugh when he gets excited. He has my mouth and my wife’s eyes which crinkle with joy. He loves the ocean. He loves bananas, blueberries, yogurt and chicken. He loves his grandmothers though he has no idea what the word “grandmother” means. He loves chewing on a plastic bath toy. He loves chewing on paper.

We will go back to the ocean soon. We will take lessons on how to swim. I will try to teach him not to put sand in his mouth. He will teach me to giggle at the waves.

Seeking Stability

I played a game with Carter’s daughter where you alternated placing metal sticks that hooked together ever outwards into space. As the rounds progressed the structure grew. Any piece that fell while you were placing had to go back into your pile. Winners were determined by who got rid of their pieces first.

I think we split the games for most of my stay.

I don’t know if a 45 year old should feel proud of beating a 10 year old, but she was the kind of competitor that wanted you to play your best. She has the geometric intuition that I had at her age, the kind that senses how things tilt less by math than by feel. My insights have started to fade, but only a little.

With each move we could make the structure more or less stable depending on whether we used the sticks as cross beams or counter balances. Chloe, the daughter, loved order and symmetry. She played for aesthetics. Thinking that the mess had an equal chance on falling on either of us, I played for chaos.

I think Chloe would have always played for order - she seemed to be constantly organizing her older siblings - but I think she needed order even more now. Her father, my best friend from high school, was having problems with his treatment for stage four lung cancer.

While there are no good versions of the disease, his particular kind has a receptor that can be attacked. There are a series of drugs that are coming out that fight the disease back. But the effectiveness of any one drug seems to last for a little more than a year. He has to keep switching the drugs and hope the treatment he is on will last until the next drug becomes available for humans. He is ticking through drug number 2.

The side effects are getting to him. The cancer has metathised to his brain and, for lack of a better analogy, has started messing with the software. He has dizzy spells and cotton mouth. The day before I arrived he collapsed and during the ride to the hospital he felt paralyzed. After a few hours resting in the ER, he felt fine. No one has an idea what happened and he is being tested next week by five different doctors.

He seemed fine the first day. I worried that he was trying to hard to be with me. He asked me to come a couple of weeks earlier when things were a little darker - the word “soon” that he left on my voicemail had a certain kind of italics - but the Carter of day one was almost energetic.

He asked during the call that we not talk about cancer, and so I did my best to bring up the teetering of my own world - the instability of software startups and the challenges of taking care of a newborn. Our personal cross beams are our wives, but sometimes the pile of things to worry about in your forties can seem so much larger than what you worried at 10.

We talked about Obama Care, the Tea Party, and supply side taxation. We discussed Kobe Bryant, Barry Bonds, the Lakers, and the Niners. We traded TV show suggestions - (mine was Episodes; his was Almost Human). We chatted about parenting which segued into sending kids to public or private schools. I told bad puns. We wandered back into being the sophomores we were when we first met, the kind where philosophy on capital systems or favorite bands was meant to be an endurance test. We stayed up late for west coast time.

The next day he needed a bit more space, and I played a few games with his wife and children. His eldest son is now an atheist who plays a ton of video games. We chatted a bit about the game Civilization, but I could sense his disappointment when I went for cultural victories instead of scientific. His middle daughter was shy and spent most of the time in her room. That left Chloe and our on going battles of order versus instability.

I decided that this game needed new rules. She was a little surprised that you could just make them up. She pointed to the side of the box that had them listed with diagrams of how the yellows could go a certain way that was much different than the reds.

I told her that we could try adding a rule for one round and if that didn’t work out remove it. At first she was horrified; the only thing worse than adding rules was removing them. She then allowed it on a trial basis.

The next round she added a rule of her own.

Just before leaving Carter and his wife joined us, and Chloe explained our vast system of challenges and double rolls. That round I came in last and I was quite okay losing, because to me it meant knowing that perhaps however small we could change the rules towards something that was not going to collapse as easy if only for a February afternoon.

The Physics of Time and Gravity.

Days have become probabilistic. At any hour I could be asleep or awake. Three o’clock in the morning and four thirty in the afternoon have bled together separated only by electricity. Time has been broken into three hour chunks which starts with feeding and ends with a diaper change. These repeat again, again, again, and again.

My wife and I have our pacifiers - not just the rubbery ones we stick in our son’s mouth. I need to code and o go to Boulange for a mocha every morning. Warm milk and iOS 7 api’s sooths me. I miss work or more of the abstraction of it. I miss the concept of sticking with something for more than thirty minutes, I miss building and designing, and I miss collaborating on a white board.

My wife misses being a manager. Sometimes she would try it out on me. Then she decided to hire one of her former workers to help organize things in the back of closets and papers deep in boxes.

We both think each other is crazy. We bicker more about things small and vast. We fret over how much time a shower should take. We worried if our son is gaining weight. We try to be as supportive as we can, and it isn’t nearly enough. Our baby cries, my wife cries, and I bluster. These repeat again, again, and again.

We learn about the outside world through cracks. Everybody used to be worried about the Syrian Government now they are worried about our own. I used to think Walter White broke bad because of lung cancer, and now I wonder if it was because he had an infant on the way.

My wife and I did escape yesterday to see the movie Gravity. It stars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as two astronauts floating above the earth. In my dreams it stars ourselves, or certainly better looking versions of ourselves. We are tethered together aloft. Every ninety minutes the world crashes and we improvise with small jokes and physic problems.

The thing about the movie is that as desperate as it gets (and we lose our breath the same way that Sandra does) around the corners it is beautiful. You watch the sun come up over the earth’s horizon. You see the storm clouds of the day and light ganglions at night. Everything floats as if it is swimming with the stars.

A few weeks in, I am not sure if parenting is meant to be enjoyed only at the edges. I love my son’s smile, his vast repertoire of breathing noises, and how happy he gets when he reaches out to hit a blue monkey doll. I loved taking him to a coffee shop to meet his grandfather. I love his farts.

There are moments of beauty in between the disasters. His crying has broken my wife and I on consecutive nights. It isn’t the size of the shriek, but the endurance of it. Our previous goto methods of swalddling and singing mostly middle period Beatles songs aren’t working as well, and we keep trying to come up with new ideas if not to distract him then at least ourselves from the fact only thing up at the hour besides us are raccoons. We share the black circles around our eyes.

Soon the infant orbit will end, and the toddler one with start, followed by the terrible twos. The rules will keep changing. We will try our best to stick together, tethered aloft above it all.

The boy in the bubble

I wanted to believe in a bubble. It wasn’t the financial or technical bubble for I have seen those both burst, but rather a personal protective bubble. I wanted to believe that you couldn’t be let go of your job four weeks before your kid arrives, that there is some bend in the universe that would protect you, and that a company that talks about being a family would understand the need when you were starting your own.

I was wrong.

Silicon Valley might be developing the newest society in the world, but is steals from one of the oldest. There is a culture of cannibalism; the place eats its old and infirmed. Innovation requires speed. Every technology will ultimately be replaced so the faster you can build a new one the more life you can give it at the start. And in order to be fast you need to cut those who can’t keep up, those who go with their wife to the doctor to discuss a c-section, those that want a few weeks off for paternity.

My kid arrives tomorrow.

I want a bubble around us to protect us from the scary world. I want our own healthy air, our own blankets for naps, our own quiet place.

The short weeks since I parted with the company have been spent power nesting. We have skateboard tape on our stairs, stickers on our walls, and cushy surfaces everywhere for changing or sleeping. We made a will and made sure the brakes of the car are up to date. We have read books and attended classes. We have slept in and exercised. We wait.

The job loss stings, but I am very lucky. My father built a bubble around me. We live in one of his houses and I get insurance through him. The c section will be paid for. I will get a chance to help my wife, to be the errand guy, to be the co changer, to feel my kid rest on me, and to spend a little moment outside the river of tech.

I keep getting asked whether I am ready to be a dad, and I don’t think there is a good answer. I know I have no concept of what it takes, and I also know that people in my position haven’t had a clue for millions of years and at least some of them came out okay. I know that I will make a ton of mistakes and that I can’t protect or provide everything. There isn’t a bubble.

What I do have is time. Perhaps not full power parenting time - I am going to need to keep slivers for my sanity and certainly nights away when I can date my wife. I want to spend time so that I get to know who my son is and will be. That I can figure out what makes him laugh, to find out what makes him passionate, and to help him as best I can. At times we will disagree, he will push my limits, or I will be harsher that I should be. It is highly likely a decade and a half from now he will think I am incredibly lame (and a good chance that he thinks that of my humor by the time he turns 4). But I hope later he will recognize the love and hope I want to pour into him.

I know I appreciate how much I received, how much I was helped. There isn’t enough I can do to honor my dad., but the best I can do is to name my son after the man who has meant the most to me.

These are the days of miracle and wonder.

And don't cry baby, don't cry.

-Arthur

Dog days of August

One turns a palindrome every 11 years, yet the distance between now and 33 feels closer than the one from 22 to 33. 33 was at is own cusp - a few weeks before the towers fell, a few months from my bank imploding in the dot com bust, and a few days after swimming from alcatraz for the first time. But I live now only 50 feet from my 30’s apartment. I traded working cramped around a trading desk in the Bank of America building to working cramped around a start up table trying to build a mobile app.

The difference is that my workspace now has dogs not phones. As part of the Hamms Building’s quest to become a tech incubator they allow dogs for their tenants. Ours is a small yapping ball that nibbles on visitors. She is taking obedience classes to try to teach to her that she is a dog even if she is the most spoken to thing in the office. Similarly my boss has a group of venture capitalist to teach him how to play fetch. Everybody has a master even if nobody has a land line.

The issue arrives when there are multiple dogs in the same elevator; I have learned to push myself towards the back while the growling escalates. Everyone believes that theirs are perfectly well behaved, but being in cramped quarters changes things. In the event of a fire the people with dogs are supposed to wait until the ones without have exited, but I have no doubt that when the flames are blaring that anyone is going to be polite.

The mobile world feels like there are too many dogs trapped in the same elevator. There is only so much territory for peoples attention and with thousands of apps on millions of phones only a few on going to survive. The earnings reports are starting to smell.

Still it is necessary to pretend that one’s own will work. At 22 I believed more than I do now, but I also thought then that no one programmed over 30. Or if they were programmers they didn’t do anything cool.

I do know that at 55 I will think I was as naive at 44 as a was at 22, but what I realize now is that there aren’t that many cool parts to programming. A good portion of it is learning how to dig out of a hole or preferably to have the communication skills so you don’t put yourself into one. But (and I do feel lucky) there are those handful of moments when an idea works, when I do feel brilliant, and that is why I take the smelly elevator everyday.

55 will be different than 44. Perhaps I will write a piece about the speed limit, only to be questioned what a car is. Perhaps I will have moved another 50 feet. I do hope for the impossible dream of getting just a bit more desk space at work, but I am glad now that the major difference between 33 and 44 is that I have someone to share the hours after work in a less smelly place we call home.

Music and Lyrics

My second solo iOS app isn’t doing very well.

I spent a grand on advertising and made 5 dollars of revenue. A trip to vegas would have been more successful though probably more hazy. With software development you can remember the exact steps you made which makes it the opposite of a hangover.

The first mistake I made is that I believe I missed the product niche. Making your own iBook is nice, but if you want to build a quality one you would use a pro tool like in design or ibook author. If you just want to send your friends photos you can do it from the camera app, or the Facebook app, or instagram, or hipstamatic, or iMessage etc. Low end sharing is pretty well solved. That doesn’t even go into companies like Flickr or Shutterfly who are desperately trying to state relevant.

The second mistake I made is that app wasn’t playful. At no point (other than flicking pages which was all apple) did the app feel fun or cute. I believe that if you can’t say something true, say something funny.

So to combine the two is to say that I made a product that people weren’t clamoring for and weren’t thrilled to use, which is a bit like saying I wrote a song whose only problems were the music and the lyrics.

The hard part is that I really like my own app. There are some great parts - like a chorus that works even if the rest of the song doesn’t. I think I will be right in that the ePub market is going to take off and there weren’t any great low end tools for it. That changed when Apple launched iBooks Author last month.

After that elephant wandering into the room, I have tried my best, solicited as many opinions about the first as I could, and push several updates to the store to try to make the app more appealing, but I have only ever received one book made with my app which was from my brother. He never used the app again.

I feel I have made the google+ of ePub apps.

And so I am left trying to figure out a new song. I think being entirely indie is too hard for me. It is a bit like trying to be Prince and play all of the instruments on a given record. I know that I good at some parts and that I should keep slugging away at the next new thing.

And I guess if that doesn’t work, I should consider vegas.

Maui Channel 2011

There is the race report that I prefer to write, the one that talks about the strength of the six relay swimmers, that goes into someone’s first ocean swim, the difficulties of raising a Justin Beiber fan or working at Qantas, the first time being four months pregnant, or the nervous father who wondered if sea sickness is similar to morning. Thankfully no one had either. But this isn’t how I will remember the 2011 race. Our little antics didn’t compare to what happened in the water.

Granted we did fine. We had a native captain and first mate who had not just an intuitive sense of the waters but also knew how to harvest them with a spear gun or chisel. Joining with them was a girl from Danville and we tried to figure out which one she was dating: the captain or the first mate. She was more scenic than nautical, and this eased the time under the boat’s tarp as we rocked in the waves towards Lanai.

The race started dangerously. The waves were the largest I have seen at the start and this was combined with the greatest number of boats. The three jet ski patrol did their best to corral the boats, but there is the hard logistics of so many in such a space. Part of the problem that now haunts the race is that it is known as the best open water swim in the world and is starting to be enrolled as such. The race has been filled with as many boats as it can find.

Right before the race one boat lost its engine. The waves pushed it towards a coral reef and its swimmers abandoned it. Shortly after the race had started and the rest of swimmers had made their way through the diesel scented flotilla another boat sank. We think we saw a bit of the boat popping up from the waves as we past it.

In a normal race two downed boats would be enough. But the radio that was turned to channel 71 crackled that a twelve foot tiger shark had been spotted just behind their swimmer.  The girl from Danville clapped in joy that she might see a shark and then took another puff from her cigarette. She seemed oblivious of any danger whether it be from smoking or dating native Hawaiians.

The shark team pulled their swimmer and asked over the radio to the race director, Coco, if they could move laterally to stay in the race. I do completely support the wisdom of the first action but have to wonder about the second. A twelve foot tiger is twice the size of me and for that matter would have measured up fairly well against the boat. One of the jet skis rushed over to monitor the shark which submerged as he approached. I have no idea of what kind of swimmer goes back into the water after a shark sighting, but the rumor was Australian.

For that matter I wonder about the people who solo this swim. Granted I have met a few on land and they are the nicest of folk, but their shoulders are different than mine and their technique is more graceful. I am, at best, a grinder, the slow guy in a master class. One of the beauties of this race is that it allows folks like me in a relay to experience the chop that they take on all by themselves. There is a shade of blue in that channel that is beautiful even as it pounds with the wind and current flowing in opposite directions. It is a struggle to time the breathing so that you make it at he top of the wave and when you do you get a small glimpse of the split of the West Maui Mountains or the L from the local high school on the hill. You readjust and then hope in a few strokes that you will time it again.

Most of these elite swimmers finish ahead of our relay team, and one, John Caughlin, was a good half hour in front. New to this year was a safety zone at the finish where the boats were not allowed to go past. Coco kept barking into the radio for ships to leave and threatened to disqualify people from the race. I have no idea if one boat in particular had its radio turned off or was just ignoring it.

What happened next bothered me in the same way that the second plane hitting a tower a decade ago did. To watch (or in our case over the radio hear) a tragedy of that magnitude changes someone.

The first call on the radio was that the boat was getting too closed to a swimmer. This was followed by a progressive series of “no,” with the last one being primal. The boat ran over Caughlin. His arm was shredded by the propellor. We heard the rushing of the ski boats and the urgent request for the ambulance on shore. He is in critical care and I hope for his survival.

I don’t know where to go from here; I have rewritten this five times moving words like “probably” and “hope” around. My wife wasn’t thrilled about me doing open water swims to begin with and tried to get me to promise never to do them again when she heard about the race. I know I need the sea. 

There is always the talk of balance and that doesn’t mean between swimming and running or between quadriceps and lats. The balance is trying to figure out the trade off between adventure and responsibility, between how much you want to chuck yourself into an epic versus those that wait at home.

The truth is that a spouse is far more important than a race. I don’t know if John has a wife or a family, but certainly there must be many who know him that are in shock right now. What happened to him was unthinkable and by no means do I blame someone for being at such a wrong place at wrong time. He is 42 and from the Bay Area and both statistics are a little to close to me. I know how hurt my wife would be and my heart goes out to all of his friends and family as well.

 I think the race needs to go through a level of introspection as much as its swimmers. Perhaps there should be a qualifier. All of the boat captains should be required to attend the pre race meeting and at the very least make the pick up and drop off for the first and final swimmer 1k off shore. If it means that people like me can’t do the race then that is a small sacrifice. I know from over the years about Coco and Ian and they are the nicest and thoughtful of race directors. They, too, must be in shock. 

I didn’t say to my wife that I would never do the channel again, but I know that my own logistics of one day (god willing) of having a kid or for that matter trips to Paris or Prague will have to come first, and both will be treasured far more than a sixth shirt from Maui. 

There are events that don’t come close to shipwrecks or wounded in good places like Tomales Bay or Santa Cruz. There is still much ocean left. Yet even with those I know that my best days are not the ones with the medals or sun burns, but the ones I can come home and share a glass of wine or laugh with my wife. There will still be day dreams about the deep blue channel sea but these will shift to realizing of how lucky I am to go home to Louise.

Hipsters

It wasn’t the best of emails.

I am in the middle of a job hunt which I feel is more difficult than it should be. My last project, WunderRadio, was successful and I am in a field, iPhone Development, that is incredibly hot. Still I got a note back from the recruiter that “they were looking for a little more creative/implementation experience” which seemed a little silly since I have been creating and implementing for the last twenty years.

It is a brutal thing to have someone say that you aren’t creative enough, but I think one of the things about trying to do a craft is to be able to take criticism. Part of my fear is that this company might be right, that I have been slacking. Looking at how much I have written recently, I can’t argue. If the good thing of writing more comes out of the bad interview, then it was worth my time explaining for the hundredth time the difference between linked lists and hash tables. So my new goal for the next few months is to write frequently.

But indulge me a bit if I provide a bit of criticism toward who continually seems to be on the other side of the table from me during these interviews - the hipster.

Having an earring does not make you creative. Neither does a nose ring. They just make you porous.

Tattoos are somebody else’s art on you. You are just the land lord.

Wearing black clothes all the time just makes you look like you are going to fashion’s funeral.

If everyone else is wearing the same thing you aren’t being original. If you really want to brave in San Francisco wear pants with lobsters on them. Or a Michelle Bachmann pin.

You aren’t your social network.

Riding a bike is great exercise, but don’t be a jerk about blocking traffic anymore than you would want traffic to be bad to you.

Coffee is a good thing.

So is showering.

One day you might be old. One day one of your projects will certainly fail. Don’t look down on others just because they reached these points before you.

Being edgy is easier than being sincere.

Being snobby is easier than being kind.

Art is about pushing something out into the world. It might not be good; most isn’t. It doesn’t have to be visually painful though there probably was a bit of pain making it. How much of the seams that you want to show is up to you.

Try.

To me art is starting with a bunch of ideas and chiseling down the bad one like Michelangelo going through his marble. Recently most of the stuff I have been doing has been reduced to dust.

But in my better moments - in maybe just a paragraph or a line - I feel that I capture the right beat or the proper pause. I can’t linger there too long or too proud. The next day is always going to require more chiseling. Life is craft.

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.