Running a half-marathon after living a half-century

Supposedly, you get smarter as you get older. But in truth, while wisdom does come age, it is sometimes accompanied by a stunning lack of judgment.

For example, in the middle of a nice hike in the north Georgia mountains with my wife Susan and daughter Allie recently, I wasn’t content to just gaze at the lovely waterfall at the end of the trail. No, I had to go walk across the rocks like I was a mountain goat, not realizing that one of them had apparently been greased with Crisco just before my arrival. I slipped and went down faster than Michael Spinks against Mike Tyson, landing on my shoulder, which I sprained, and on my head, which I’m pretty sure I concussed.

Being a man, I told everyone that I was fine, walked back to the car, drove back home, and quietly cried myself to sleep every night for a week until I went to the doctor and he gave me enough muscle relaxers to subdue King Kong.

I wasn’t going to let that little setback get in the way of more bad judgment, however, which is why a week later I found myself on the streets of Athens in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday morning, getting ready to run a half-marathon with a couple thousand other total morons.

What made me do this? I’d run one before, so what the heck, I figured, I can do it again. Never mind the last time I did it was several years before those jerks at AARP had the nerve to mail me a membership card. For one thing, I resent the implication that I’m old. For another, at my current rate, I’ll be 102 years old (roughly) before I’m able to retire.

But 2014 has been a pretty rough year for me. I’ve had some things happen I never would have imagined, made some dumb decisions and suffered from some pretty back luck, so I figured I was due for something positive, thus my decision to train and complete the torture course known as the Athens Half Marathon.

We started running on Clayton Street in downtown before the sun even came up. I used to run the streets in Athens in the dark quite a bit when I was a student at UGA, but that was something different.

When you do something like run a half-marathon at the age of 50, there are couple of ways to look at it. One is, wow, almost everybody else doing this around me is younger than me, so I should feel pretty proud. And the other way to look at it is, wow, almost everyone else doing this around me is younger than me, so I must be totally insane.

I didn’t run fast. I got passed by a lot of people, including college-age girls, which again – I got pretty used to college girls running from me when I was a student at UGA.

My son David and I ran this race together. Well, not together, exactly. We ran it the same morning. He finished predictably well ahead of me. He had time to go home, shower, make a sandwich and take a nice nap before I finally crossed the finish line. But he isn’t carrying some of the baggage I am, like old injuries, 40 extra pounds and financial burdens. So, on a weighted basis, we probably tied, when you think about it.

The good news is, I finished the race, and with a time of 2 hours and 14 minutes, beat my goal by a minute. At the last part of the run, they let you do a lap inside the country’s greatest college football stadium, and when you finish they give you a bottle of water and one-fourth of a banana. OK, maybe that part wasn’t so great, but I also got an incredible sense of satisfaction. I might be seasoned, I might no longer have the body of an underwear model (Did I ever? I’ll let the reader wonder), and I might not be breaking any Olympic records. But for at least one morning, I felt that maybe I wasn’t over the hill quite yet. That alone convinced that maybe this decision wasn’t a bad one after all.

My personal commencement address

So, what advice do you give a brand new college graduate who is about to go out and truly face the world for the first time?

I will soon have one of those in my family. Allie will graduate from the University of Georgia in a couple of weeks. It is so hard to believe. The great John Prine once sang, “Time don’t fly, it bounds and leaps.” It feels like it was just last week when I was dropping her off at the decrepit dorm on a warm and bittersweet August day. It was not the Georgia humidity that caused the wetness on my cheeks as I drove away from Athens.

That is such a wonderful stage of life, a time full of wonder and anticipation and fear and excitement. A time of being on your own, of finding new friends and experiences and eating pizza five times a week. I am so proud of her for how she handled things. I got no phone calls in the middle of the night from the Athens police, never had to post bail or hunt down a male student to deliver justice.

Oh sure, there were some emergencies – a broken foot here, a fender bender there. There were some calls looking for advice, or guidance, or money – well, mostly money – but I don’t mind those. I’ll let you in on a secret about dads, we actually sort of like those kinds of calls. It makes us feel useful.

She made a lot of great friends and did a lot of meaningful work through Navigators, an on-campus ministry, in which her brother David is also active. She went to football games in the country’s greatest stadium, went to parties and dances and cookouts, spent long nights writing papers she’d put off doing and lazy days swinging in a hammock and reading. I am intensely jealous.

But, now what? Here comes the real world, the world of payments and commutes and idiot bosses and premature gray hair. The thought of leaving behind those friends and that social scene has to be frightening. I know it was for me, and I didn’t have nearly the collegiate experience she did. I was only at UGA for two years and lived off-campus with a group of fellow slackers and derelicts known as my friends.

I was completely unprepared for life as my college career ended. I guess my strategy was if I didn’t think about it, it wouldn’t be real. I mean, I had things pretty good. I had a lot of friends, I had my own apartment, I was playing drums in a band, and I was living in Athens, Ga., a town blessed by God and populated by lots of pretty girls. Why would I look forward to leaving that?

And then, about two weeks before graduation, I was at home on the weekend and my dad said “What are you going to do when you graduate?”

I said, “I dunno.”

He said, “Well, I know what you’re NOT going to do, and that’s just sit around here and do nothing. Go find a job.”

Thus ended our one and only conversation about my career prospects. I went out, and got a job, and have had one (mostly) ever since. Some have been good, some have been bad. Some paid me a lot of money, some paid me less than a sharecropper. I have had bosses who were great and I’ve had bosses who shouldn’t be in charge of an outhouse. It’s life.

This is not easy for a parent. On the one hand, you want your child to earn money. You want them to be able to support themselves and pay for their own car insurance and life insurance and cell phone bill and..hang on, I need to wipe the drool off my face.

But you don’t want them to make the same mistakes you have made. You don’t want them driving home from work and wondering if what they’re doing is positively impacting anyone, anywhere. You don’t want them waking up with a stomachache thinking about what they’ll be doing for the next eight hours. And you don’t want them one day to be filled with regret, asking themselves “How did I get here?”

So here’s what I will say, to my kids and to anybody in the same spot who will listen – figure out what you love to do, and find a way to do it. That is simple, but difficult – much like losing weight. Don’t take the path of least resistance. Don’t give up your ideals and dreams just because it’s not easy. (This works better if you play inspirational music while you’re reading, like maybe the theme from “Chariots of Fire”).

Will it be wonderful if this career path offers insurance and enough money so that you can live on your own and not have to eat like Oliver Twist? Well, yes. But never do anything just for the money. Keep the faith, don’t quit, and never forget who you are, and how you were raised, and what you have become. I promise if you do that, we’ll all be all right.

Repairing my reputation

I have never really considered myself much of a handy man. Nor has anyone who’s ever known me. I have always enjoyed working in the yard and keep a meticulous lawn, but inside the house, I was useless.

Oh, I would try to fix things. If something broke that was crucial to day-to-day living – toilets, for example -  I found a way to get it done. I have a lot of experience with toilets. (insert your own joke here).

But usually, when something was broken, I would make one attempt, decide it was too difficult to complete the needed repair, tell my wife I’d take care of it later and then hope she would forget about it.

Lately, though, I’ve been on a tear. I’ve been fixing stuff left and right, and I’m learning it’s not as hard I’d feared.

Here’s a case in point. We had a few light fixtures that hadn’t worked in years. I had replaced the light bulbs – that was in my skill set – but it hadn’t worked. So I chalked it up to some sort of mysterious wiring problem and put off calling an electrician, because they charge more per hour than a neurosurgeon.

But on a recent day, after fixing a laundry door that hadn’t closed in years (total repair time – 30 seconds) and replacing a smoke detector that had been disconnected since the Clinton administration, I looked at one of the light fixtures and thought, well, let’s just put a new light bulb in. You know, to confirm that it was a bigger problem.

It wasn’t a bigger problem. There was light.

“I fixed the lights,” I told my wife when she came home.

“What was wrong with them?” she asked.

“It’s technical and I won’t bore you with the details. But I was able to diagnose the problem and make the repairs.”

“You just put new light bulbs in, didn’t you?”

Dang it. How do they do that?

Anyway, I remembered that a repairman had once told me that those fixtures wouldn’t really handle anything more than 60-watt bulbs. He told me that about, oh, 10 years ago, and I had forgotten. I can remember all the words of “American Pie” and “Stairway to Heaven” every time they come on the radio, but sometimes I forget trivial things. It happens.

Our house is nearing 20 years old and was apparently built by the first two little pigs, so it’s been in need of some repairs lately – and by some, I mean a lot. Our house needs more maintenance work than Dolly Parton. And she’s much better built.

My wife watches these crazy TV shows where people (aided by an army of off-camera workers) take an old house and within the space of a 30-minute show, they’ve transformed a shotgun shack into the Playboy Mansion. These shows are clearly not real. They may as well have David Copperfield serve as host.

But my wife will watch, mesmerized as some male model makes it look like installing kitchen tile is as easy as fingerpainting, and then she says, “We should find an old house and redo it.” I either pretend I don’t hear her or I fake a heart attack until this madness passes.

The concept of buying a dilapidated house eludes me. You wouldn’t buy a rusty car that’s up on blocks and has holes in the floorboard.

My recent binge of repairs was prompted by a series of catastrophes in January.  A pipe froze and then burst when the temperature dropped to (approximately) minus-50 degrees one night, turning our entire downstairs into a kiddie pool.  As a result, we had to replace all the flooring and kitchen cabinets and a good portion of the drywall downstairs, so a demolition crew came over and ripped it all out, leaving us to live in a crack house for two months.

A local plumber/extortionist came out and repaired the leak, but apparently fixed the pipe with a piece of chewing gum, because two weeks later I came home to find water pouring out from under the front door. Now I’m not Bob Vila, but I knew that meant something was wrong.

Luckily with this break, nothing was damaged, since no actual repair work had begun. Which came in handy a week later when the damn pipe froze again, in large part because the wall was torn out and it was exposed.  This time my wife was home and has become well-acquainted with the water shut-off valve, and we weren’t even fazed.

“Well,” she said when she called me, “The house has flooded again.”

“Ok,” I said. “What’s for supper?”

Eventually, we got nice new floors and cabinets and drywall and fresh paint and something called a “backsplash”, all of which only served to illuminate the shabbiness of the rest of the house. So old Mark “Tool Time” Williams went to work, and now the house looks good enough for company, as long as we don’t let them go upstairs. Some of the lights up there don’t work.

Made in America

Made in America

October 25, 2013 at 4:39pm

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For no particular reason the other day, while looking around at an interstate choked with Nissans and Toyotas and Hondas, I proclaimed loudly, “I am never buying a Japanese car.”

 

Why, my wife asked? (Apparently, I’d forgotten she was in the car).

 

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “My father fought against that country and died in World War 2. How could I in good conscience buy one of their cars?”

 

“Aren’t you taking your father to the doctor next week?” she asked.

 

“Well, yes. Men of that generation were a lot tougher than those today. You had to kill them more than once.”

 

This was in my mind because I had to buy a new car recently. My sporty 2000 beige Chevrolet Impala with the cracked windshield and functioning cassette deck was totaled in a hit-and-run accident. I settled on a nice new Buick, which I know takes my coolness factor from 1 to minus-20.

 

I decided early in the process that I would buy an American car. This commitment to the red, white and blue has not always served me well. I once bought a Dodge Shadow, which appears on just about every “Worst car of all time” list you can find. It had an engine built by Briggs and Stratton and was less reliable than George Jones in the '70s.

 

My father worked for many years at General Motors, so I’ve always been loyal to those brands. However, it is probably here that I should point out that two of my dad’s most recent vehicle purchases were a Dodge truck and a Ford sedan. So clearly, I’m the only one who cares.

 

Well, whatever. I yam what I yam.

 

As dad and I were driving up the interstate on the way to the doctor, I was expounding on my theory that it was a dishonor to his memory, even though he’s still alive, to buy a Japanese car. So the World War 2 veteran pointed to an Altima just head of us and said, “That’s a nice car.”

 

“Daddy!” I said. “That’s a Japanese car. I would never buy one of those.”

 

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Me either.” I also got him to agree that neither of us would ever buy any damn Korean car, though they never attacked us directly, and they came off as pretty decent people in all the M*A*S*H episodes I saw. Then I saw a nice Mercedes-Benz and said “Now, if I had the money, I wouldn’t mind one of those.”

 

“You know, the Germans were involved in World War 2, as well,” he said. Well, nobody’s perfect.

 

Now, I know plenty of people would accuse me of being small-minded or jingoistic or just behind-the-times when it comes to not buying foreign-made cars. Maybe so. Maybe I was too affected when I watched “Tora! Tora! Tora!” as a kid. But for me, I guess it will always be baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet – or at least a cool Buick.

Couch potato

My wife informed me the other day that she intended to buy a new sofa.

“But we already have a sofa,” I said.

She glared at me and said she didn’t want something that was old, worn out, dirty, out-of-style, and needed to be replaced in her house anymore. At least I THINK she was talking about the sofa.

She showed me the one she was getting and, after I was revived from passing out when I saw the price tag, I allowed that it was a nice sofa, and should make for some pleasant, comfortable afternoon naps.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You can’t lie on this sofa.”

Now hold on just a cotton-pickin’ minute here. I’m ok with the fact that we have entire cabinets full of dishes and china that I’m not allowed to use. I made peace with the fact that I’m not supposed to dry my hands (or anything else, apparently) on the perfectly usable hand towels in the downstairs bathroom. I’ve accepted that cutting my toenails in bed is not conducive to a harmonious household – though in my defense, I only did it on MY side of the bed.

Anyway, my point is, there are certain concessions and compromises you have to make in life. But what good is a sofa you can’t lie on?

I am not going to give up lying on the couch and watching sports on my ridiculously large TV. It’s one of my hobbies.

I’m kidding. It’s my ONLY hobby.

I made this point and my wife said that we could move the old sofa upstairs to the bonus room, and I could lie on it there. Well, there are a couple of problems with that. For one, our bonus room looks like a highway underpass where homeless people live, minus the homeless people. And more importantly, there is no TV in there.

Well, she says, we can “fix it up.” Get a new TV to go in there. Clear out my prized record album collection, to which I am very attached even though I haven’t had a working turntable since before the Berlin Wall fell.

I don’t think this bonus room thing is going to happen, and I think I’m going to be reduced to taking naps on the floor, next to the dog, who is flatulent and snores violently. This is not working out well for me – I’ve been tricked.

At least I got to approve the sofa purchase. You have to watch women or they’ll sneak stuff in on you when you’re not looking. I just happened to notice what appeared to be some new pictures hanging on the wall of the bathroom the other day, so I asked about them.

“Yes,” my wife said. “I bought new pictures.”

“But what was wrong with the pictures we had in there before?”

“They were old,” she said.

Uh, hello – have you ever been to a museum? EVERY picture in there is old. It’s what makes them good. Do you think they’re going to go and replace the Mona Lisa because somebody saw a cute picture of an Amish family having a picnic in Kirkland’s? If it’s good enough for The Louvre, it’s good enough for my loo.

Did cavemen go through this? I picture the following happening after a Neanderthal walks into his cave one day and looks around:

Man: “Honey, what happened to the picture I drew on the wall of me hunting a bison?”

Woman: “Oh, I got rid of that. I didn’t like it.”

Man: “OK, but do you realize that was, like, the first attempt at language in the history of man, and that one day historians and archaeologists can use it to learn how we lived?”

Woman: “It was old. Oh, and by the way, they’re delivering a new rock to the cave tomorrow. You can’t lie on it. We’re moving your old rock to the bonus cave.”

Hopefully he at least had a TV in there.

The old man and the garden

So it was time to plant the garden again. I planted butterbeans and squash and green beans and cucumbers and watermelons and I look forward to spending the next few weeks tending it carefully and boring people to death telling them about it.

I guess this is some sort of mid-life crisis thing, taking up gardening just before the age of 50. But hey, some guys get Corvettes, some guys run off with strippers. In comparison, my new vegetable obsession doesn’t seem so bad.

I learned some lessons last year, my first a full-time gardener. One was that deer love to eat peas, well before they are ready to be picked. Those SOBs ate every last plant, which is why I support hunting them to extinction.

I also learned that you need to study the seed packets carefully before planting. I grew some watermelons and they got to be about the size of a cantaloupe in a few weeks, and I thought mmmm, these are going to be good.

Then, for weeks after that, they remained the size of a cantaloupe, and finally I realized I had planted some variety of “dwarf” watermelons, and they weren’t going to get any bigger. Why is there even such a thing as a “dwarf” watermelon? Who eats these, Snow White?

I plant the garden on a patch of land out in Lamar County where my dad lives. He’s almost 86 and last year he assured me that he was done with gardening, and he was not going to plant anything this year. Month by month, his commitment to retiring from gardening began to erode. “Well, maybe a few tomatoes” became “I might plant some squash” then “I’m thinking about rowing some peppers” and so on. When I finally went to plant my portion, he had already plowed and planted enough to feed the population of Turkmenistan.

On the day of the planting, I took him to a follow-up doctor’s visit. While it is kind of cool to take advantage of the handicapped parking sticker on his car, these trips cab be a little discouraging. That’s when he seems older, a little more feeble every time, walking a little slower.

But out there in the garden, that all goes away. He’s out there manhandling the tiller up and down the rows to turn the ground and hardly breaking a sweat. Out there in his element, he doesn’t look like an old man at all. He looks like my daddy. Meanwhile, I used that tiller for about an hour and it made me so sore I needed help combing my hair for the next two days.

As I prepared to re-till the ground for planting, I asked my dad if he had any gloves. He looked at me kind of funny and said, “No. Why?” I said well, I just thought I’d use some, because last time I did this I got blisters.  He didn’t say anything, but the look on his face pretty much communicated “You’re a sissy.” Hey, I have delicate hands. Does that make me a sissy?

Don’t answer that.

Anyway, the seeds are in the ground, the anticipation has begun, and it won’t be long before I’ll be complaining about all the work this stupid garden has created and how much my back hurts and wondering why I can’t just be satisfied with eating green beans from a can. And I’ll be loving every minute of it.

Being neighborly

We had some new neighbors move in last week, a couple that appears to be about our age. I’ve met them both and they seem like perfectly nice people, but I’m going to reserve judgment because they could turn out to be something terrifying, like serial killers or swingers or Tennessee fans. They were wearing shoes and I didn’t need Honey Boo Boo-type subtitles to understand them when they talked, so I can probably eliminate the Tennessee angle.

It should be a nice change, because that house has been a nightmare next door for several years. First there was a couple that apparently suffered from agoraphobia, and neglected the front lawn until it became nothing but weeds and rocks. There’s more grass in Willie Nelson’s pocket than there is in that yard. After they moved out they started renting the house to a succession of rednecks who would move in, live for a while, and then escape under the cover of darkness.

There are some nice neighbors around me, on the other side and across the street, and although I like them and talk to them frequently, I couldn’t tell you any of their last names at gunpoint. These new folks have already worked on the lawn and spread pine straw and pressure-washed the house, so I think we might get along. But while it is nice to have neighbors who view their front yard as something other than a place to park their cars, I realize I’m going to have to adjust my behaviors.

For example, in the warmer months, I have been known to walk outside in only my boxer shorts after dark to get something out of the car or throw something in the trash can. My wife really wishes I wouldn’t do this – not because she’s afraid someone will see me half-naked, but because she doesn’t want people to know I wear Sponge-Bob Squarepants underwear.

I may also have to curtail my anti-squirrel crusade in the back yard. I like to sit out back on the patio when I’m grilling something, drink a nice cold beverage, and shoot at these despicable varmints with a .BB gun. It’s not powerful enough to do them any harm, but it is fun to watch them jump up in the air in surprise when I score a direct hit. Anyway, I can imagine how this will probably look to the neighbors.

Then there is my annual late winter-early spring backyard fire, which is also harmless and quite probably illegal.  I basically gather all of the sticks and limbs and leaves that have accumulated over the past year and put them in a pile, and then I pull up a nice lawn chair, get some lighter fluid and matches, and let the fun begin.

The highlight always comes when I toss the Christmas tree on top. Let me tell you, a Leyland Cypress that’s been lying in the yard, drying out for three months, lights up like a Saturn rocket when it’s tossed into the flames. The last time I did it, a legion of warriors from Gondor rode up and offered to help me in battle (that one was just for you Lord of the Rings fans).

I think I’m going to go ahead and have my fire this year and just see what happens. I may get some marshmallows and graham crackers and Hershey bars and keep them on hand, so if the cops show up I can say I was just making S’mores for me and Lucky.

I guess I’ll try to act decent for a while and not scare these poor people away. Maybe at some point, I’ll ever learn their last names.