A guy walks into a bar*

On July 4th 2004 I quit smoking. On July 5th, 2004 I started running.
The first thing was a simple decision to not die before my mother. I simply did not want to put her through the act of burying another child.
Yeah, that's really why I quit.

The running thing was more complicated, one part distraction from grief, one part the not dying before my mom thing, and two parts wanting to do something that was HARD and a little bit like punishment.
I'm currently still saving for the therapy I probably need to sort that last bit out.

I've been struggling with my running since I moved to North Carolina in Spring 2005. I've had one injury after another, struggled with finding a gym I didn't hate, and had a horrible time sticking to any kind of training program. I promised myself this year to get my act together and train for an event.

My life finally feels like my own here. I'm not sure what took so long, the complete career change, the leaving the life/place/friends I've had for 20 plus years behind and moving somewhere I knew absolutely no one. Nothing in that to make me feel little off-kilter, right?
There is no way I can train to run 26.2 miles when my kilter is crooked.

Just after the first of the year I started planning, and I started with the need to lose some weight that had found me. It's funny how when you stop running 30-35 miles a week and don't stop eating like you're still running 30-35 miles/week - the weight just finds you and hangs around.
Literally, around.

This summer I had an annual physical, and yes, for the person that said "don't you think you should be over that by now" four years after losing my brother I get all choked up when I have to talk to a medical professional about my family history. The nurse practitioner I saw said great things about my health, my blood work, my body weight and actually asked if she could record my heart for teaching purposes (Ohhellzyeahyoucan) I'm approaching "a certain age" and so I heard a lot of sentences that started with "a woman your age should..." I'll be unhappy about this another time, currently I still feel too good about the visit to get all weird about growing older.

Somewhere between that and the weight loss meetings I've been attending, I've been doing some significant thinking about my health.
I think it started with my mom, she'll be 76 this year, still drives from south Florida to North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and/or New Jersey and Massachusetts about three times a year. She walks about 5 miles a day, and runs around after her two youngest granddaughters almost daily. My mom, she is no slacker. My dad is about a year older, and my last email from him said he had just finished his first book (to be released at the end of September), and is going antelope hunting in Montana and deer hunting in western Nebraska later this fall. My dad, not a slouch.

Both sets of my grandparents were dead and gone before I was out of grade school. Two, I never met, were dead years before I was born.

I have no intention of lecturing anyone on taking better care of their health. None. I smoked for years, and have been known to eat a tub of cool whip for dinner. In college I lived on free donuts the cops brought us, coke, stale coffee, Ramen noodles and Hormel chili for more years than I can to remember.

I do want to say this though, just about an hour ago, my sister Karen called me, to tell me she is a grandma. Her son, Matthew and his wife Erin welcomed their first baby girl, Jodi, into the world tonight. My mom is a great grandma. That little baby doesn't have any way of understanding how many people already love her, but I'm grateful to be a part of a family that loved themselves and us enough to take care of themselves so they could be here long enough to meet her.

For all it's warts, and age spots, this life is not so bad, and I'll take the warts to hear the happy in my moms voice when she tells me about her first great-grandbaby.



*I am tired of trying to title posts - I am using the first phrase that pops into my head when I put the blinky cursor in the title box. Deal with it.

Arrowhead

I didn’t sleep well or much last night. Around 5 I fell asleep for about 30 minutes, and had the first dream about my brother since he died. Fully awake now, the pieces are still just pieces, but dreaming of him brought this memory back. This is not sunshine and flowers friends, so if that’s why you came, move along, nothing here to see.

The year before Mark died; he went to visit the home and now private museum of his favorite author, Herman Melville. Moby Dick was Mark’s favorite story, and his favorite book to teach to his students. Every year, he promised an ‘A’ to any student in the class who could find the part in the book where Melville switches from first person to third. I’d happily share that secret with you, but I wasn’t one of his ‘A’ students.

Sitting in my brother’s house just days after his death the discussion of what to do with Mark’s ashes was settled without discussion the second Steve Clicks suggested they be scattered at Melville’s home. Some things you know are right the instant you hear them. I don’t remember Steve saying anything else that week, but I remember this as clearly as I remember what happened yesterday. Looking at it now, it feels like this is why he was there that day.

My sister Julie made the arrangements, Arrowhead is a privately funded museum, and she explained to them who Mark was and what it would mean to us to leave him there. They couldn’t have been more generous, gracious or willing to help my family ease our suffering.

We went in June.
Early June in New England is only summer during the hours of noon and 3pm, before and after those hours, it’s late winter, or at least fall, with temps falling to 40 degrees and reminding me why I live in the South.

When my family visited, one of the curators met us 90 minutes before the official opening, offering a private tour of the house /museum and then leaving us to say our goodbyes privately and scatter his ashes in the field behind Melville’s home.

All I remember of the first floor is dark wood and fireplaces, but I dutifully climbed the stairs behind my remaining family feeling the weight of things I could not measure. As we all settled into the study around the tour guide I found myself staring at the floorboards, whispering to myself under my breath to look, to see that room the way he had seen it, just a year earlier.

I lifted my head, looked across the room to Melville’s carefully staged desk and out the window behind it, to Mt. Greylock, I felt my chest tighten, and suddenly, all the oxygen was gone from the room.

That view, that room. My brother.

I turned and fled the room, headed for the stairs we had just ascended. It got better when I got outside, to the fields surrounding the house. I tried to hear my friend Eileen’s voice in my head telling me when things got difficult to focus on my breathing. By the time my family reappeared, I had control.

I remember people reading passages from favorite books, and others with a few words to say as they scattered the remains of my brother into the wind on a hillside in New England. My mom cried while she talked about the joy Mark had given her. Mark’s best friend Bob held me as I cried, watching my mom, useless and helpless against either of our pain. I carried my youngest niece down the hill her legs wrapped around my waist; she wiped away my tears and said “He shouldn’t have died when he did.” Showing me that wisdom can come from anywhere, even sad seven year old nieces. Later that evening I would help that niece move caterpillars off the sidewalk in front of the restaurant we would eat dinner in. She couldn’t live with the fact that someone might step on them. So we moved them to the grass, one by one, for an hour and a half.
It made her feel better to have an ally, and helping her made me feel better.

Up in smoke

My parents’ families are both from a line of central Pennsylvania coal miners.
At different times in my life both of my parents have told me that they heard their fathers saying to them or their brothers to “do anything they wanted in life but to never go into the mines.” To the last one, they all listened.

Many of them enlisted in the military, others just up and moved away, two to Florida, one all the way to California. No coal mines in either of those places. In fact, only 3 stayed in central Pennsylvania, one became a teacher, one a housewife, and one opened a gas station in a tiny little town called Ebensburg.

My grandmother died in her early fifties, long before I was born, of emphysema. Mom tells me she remembers lying in bed listening to her cough and then when the fit passed, she’d light a cigarette. Mom still shakes her head when she tells that story.

The uncle that opened the gas station was Ditter, well Richard, but he was somehow, always, Uncle Ditter. The gas station was an Arco, I remember the baseball caps my other Uncle used to wear “Ditter’s Arco” red, white and blue. Ditter died just after I graduated from high school, lung cancer. I can still remember her face as she climbed out of the car after returning from his funeral. It was the first time I understood what devastated looked like.

Now, her oldest brother, Bob is dying of emphysema. He’s down to 25% of his lung capacity. It is truly, just a matter of time. He’s one of the ones that moved to Florida - some 65 years ago, started selling cars, and eventually bought the dealership. It’s always been a novelty for me to go to Florida and see my Uncle’s name on the back of a car.

Bob is the brother that convinced the youngest brother that if he jumped off the roof of their 3-story home holding an umbrella he’d float to the ground. (When I hear this story I always picture Jack Nicholson as the joker floating to the ground from the roof of a Gotham City building). My Uncle Butch did not float and will happily rattle of the list of broken bones he acquired from trusting Bob on this one.

I remember seeing the ocean for the first time at his house in Merritt Island. I remember that at Uncle Bob’s you have hamburgers on Mondays, and only after you have your salad. I know that he’s such a fixture at this golf/country club that when he comes to dinner they only put 14 french fries on his plate. Apparently he once complained about there just being too many fries and someone made note of it. I know how he’s taken care of his family, what a good brother, husband and father he’s been.

I am unspeakably sad to see my mom steeling herself for what will be another, large, and much too soon assault on her emotions.

Tonight, I find myself wishing that when my grandfathers were giving out their life advice, it had been “stay out of the mines and don’t ever pick up a cigarette.” They listened so well to the first part, would they have listened to the second?

Dear Old Dad

Holidays are all about families, so I thought I'd share a little bit of my own.

Last Thanksgiving one of my sisters and I traveled to his my dad’s newly built home in Omaha for the holiday. Anytime a sibling offers to make this trip with me I jump on it. As I said, I love him, but being the only ‘new’ thing to focus on is far too much for me. I want some dispersion of all that crazy talk that’s going to happen. This particular sister is a great one to take this trip with because she’s the sibling that has always managed to maintain a peace with him that the rest of us have struggled with throughout our relationship with him. She’s also really funny, especially after a glass or two of wine, which, make no mistake, is another necessary ingredient in a successful trip to Omaha.

In the bathroom off the kitchen my dad has a plaque that says “I wasn’t born in Nebraska, but I got here as soon as I could”. So, normal is at a premium in these parts.

I started Thanksgiving day by going out for a run. I admit, I get a kick out of my dad shaking his head at me over his morning coffee cup and paper as I head out the front door, he thinks runnings proper place is boot camp and can't figure out why someone would willingly do it. When I run in Omaha, I’m amazed by the wind – it’s just different there, I can totally buy a windstorm that picks up a house ala Dorothy style. My dad shakes his head at me over this too, and usually says something like “we are in the goddamn plain states, what did you expect?” Ah, the cheery loving bosom of family.

After dinner, sister, step mom and myself clean up, do some dishes and settle around the kitchen table with a bottle of wine. Dad follows the American tradition of falling asleep on the couch. Upon awaking, my dad decides it’s time for sister and I to learn some things. He comes into the kitchen pours himself a glass of wine and plunks two hand guns down on the kitchen table. Try not to be alarmed at the alcohol/handgun combination. A lecture in how my sister and I as single women who live alone follows. We apparently should ARM OURSELVES, and if the GD airlines weren’t run by Nazis he’d give us these two pistols to take home. This lecture ends with him saying if our homes were invaded by PUNK BASTARDS who think IT’S THEIR RIGHT TO TAKE WHAT YOU’VE EARNED we should barricade ourselves in a bathroom and when they (the punk bastards) get to the door START SHOOTING. He goes on to tell us how prepared he is to defend his home against home invasion. Apparently, my father has enough guns in his home to arm a small country. Some are secured in a 300 pound guns safe in the basement, the rest are hidden all over the home.. just waiting for PUNK BASTARDS to show up and challenge my 75 year old father. Trust me, these PUNK BASTARDS will be very sorry if they stumble into my Dads quiet suburban, and yes, heavily armed, home.

As I recall my sister and I said things like “Yeah!” “Punks!” and “Great idea, dad”. Lecture finished, daughters impressed, Dad went back to his spot on the couch and commenced cussing at the football game.

The next day, my step mom had to run some food over to a member of her church. Apparently the wife of this family had had a liver transplant and the church had organized meal delivery for them. She tells me I should come, apparently these people spend a fair amount of time rescuing dogs and have quite a pack. Eager to get out of the house and with the lure of paw pads and wagging tails, I was in. In the end we all piled into my dads truck and headed out, fried chicken and sides with sister and I on the back seat. As we head down one rural mid-western road, my dad hits the brakes and shouts “Look Girls, there’s a dead deer!” Now, I admit to looking at dead animals when I pass, but not with this level of excitement. Sister and I exchanged a puzzled glance and made nice affirmative noises. Dad seems appeased, but then says “We’ll have to stop and look at that when we come back”. More puzzled looks pass between sister and I.

As promised on the return trip, Dad pulls off the road at the scene of the crime and insists we all get out and check out the dead deer. Sister and are completely flummoxed, and I at least am somewhat alarmed. We climb out of the car and watch as our father lifts the head of the deer by the antlers, clucks disapprovingly, and says “Yeah, he was a big buck”. Dad puts the head down and we all walk back to the truck. If my sister and I hadn’t had years of practice laughing silently we would never been able to make it back to the car without explaining to our father what was so damn funny. I’m not sure we even knew.

At home later that winter and shopping, I found a nifty wine opener that had all these exclamation points following the words "ergonomic" and "easy use" so I picked a couple up. My step mother suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and I remembered how she struggled with the one they had when I was there. I got a nice phone call from my step mom thanking me and telling me how much she liked it. Winna! Winna! Chicken dinna!

This past spring I tried to call my dear old dad on his birthday, and couldn’t reach him. He’s not usually difficult to track down so I called my sisters and asked if they had spoken to him. My oldest sister says she has, and everything is okay now, but the house was struck by lightning the night before and burned to the ground. He and my step mom were able to get the dogs, some family jewelry and THE CORKSCREW out before losing everything else. That’s right. They saved the corkscrew. The house and all of the contents are ashes, but the corkscrew made it.

We all need priorities people.