Something old - something new...

“...for it is more blessed
to give than receive."
Acts 20:25 - Bible

I was pretty sure Marilynn had given me the thing, although to be fair she is equally sure she had never seen it. 

I suppose, in the big picture, it is at best a mystery – at least in the way each of us thinks of it…never mind, it made me feel good to be reminded, in spite of our collective memories, she has a generous spirit.

The ‘thing’ is a grey tee shirt with a lovely royal blue silk screen of my high school.  It came my way, however it happened, somewhere in the early 2000s and has been a proudly worn staple over the last decade as I have endured an ever-escalating reduction in my exercise capacity. In spite of its regular use, it has held up surprisingly well.

The shirt is my favorite and every few days – following its regular washings – before taking it out of the drawer, I give it a quick look and am momentarily reminded of a place and time where all seemed right with the world.

It then comes out to play and is slipped over my head before we ‘go to work.’ This shirt brings with it a sense of quiet satisfaction, acting as a touchstone of sorts, reminding me what a privilege it was to have lived in the most supportive of communities and to have attended that school.

I had suggested several months earlier how nice it might be to have a set of those tee shirts made for the upcoming class reunion. The idea didn’t seem to get much traction, and to be honest I was a little bummed.

In full disclosure, I simply hoped for a new one, as I anticipated with a little melancholy, that like me the shirt had less life in front of it than it had in its past.

In any event, the 50^th reunion was coming up and I planned to take that tee shirt and wearing it at the informal Friday night kick off reception. Under an unbuttoned hiking shirt, its age would hardly be noticeable.

“Almost Heaven, West Virginia…"

The time came for the reunion and in a few short days the hard work by the organizing committee would come to fruition – around 160 indicated they were coming.

Fairmont, West Virginia, is nestled along the banks of the Monongahela River some 90 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  I spent the most formative years of my life in that small town – from 5^th grade through college – and unless you lived there, it is an almost purposeless exercise to describe how special it was growing up in that petri dish.

Getting there was pretty straightforward…Tucson > Dallas > Pittsburgh in the air…on the ground it was a rental car, riding a ribbon of highway into some of the most scenic land this country has to offer.

It wasn’t until I was halfway to Dallas that I realized I had left that tee shirt at home in my dresser drawer. Damn!

Heading south along Interstate 79, familiar names and feelings drifted through my mind like the softness of a gentle summer’s breeze caressing branches of the hardwood trees along the way.  Opening the car windows I took some deep breaths, and everything good from the creation of God coursed through my nostrils, into my lungs and somehow…in some way…slipped into my soul and whispered, “You’re home.”

“West ‘by God’ Virginia." – an expression well earned!

A slight detour…

The drive began Wednesday afternoon, a couple of days before the event, so I took a left turn in Morgantown and headed to Canaan Valley to visit an old college roommate. As I wandered through the twisting roads of the Appalachian Mountains, I wondered how it would be to see him again. The visit with Stan could not have been better. Older? Sure, but the spirit that had resonated more than four decades earlier was alive and well.

Friday morning it was off to Charleston to see a fellow with whom I had served in the army. Snaking through those mountain roads with the early morning sun kissing the tops of richly green mountains to the west was breath taking.

Dave was waiting at the airport in Charleston, and over the next couple of hours it seemed we were a couple of youngsters on our way to and returning from that foreign land so far west, it was in the ‘far East.’  There are few with whom I have had such rich and deep interaction…neither of us was disappointed.

Break over…

Soon, it was time to head north on I-79 to Fairmont and the beginning of the festivities that night, and what a great night it was! Tee shirtless...only I knew the mild disappointment I felt for having left that cotton companion at home.

There were events planned for the next day. I chose to take a tour hosted by the Marion County Historical Society...narrated by the formidably knowledgeable Dora Kay. It was a morning to remember.

In the afternoon there was a tour of the high school, which I missed because of another activity. When my event was done, I headed to the hotel for some work before the Saturday night festivities began.

I had started a little writing when Allen, a classmate, called the room and wondered whether he might stop by with something for me. I said sure and before I knew it there was a knock on the door. In his hand was a brand new extra large tee shirt. Not just a tee shirt, but a brand new silk-screen replica of that ‘trusty exercise partner’ sitting at home in my drawer!

I was flabbergasted!

A reflection of this community…

Carol, the high school historian and engine behind refurbishing the school and getting it on the National Registry, secretly had this shirt made for me! Since I had missed the tour, she asked Allen to pass it along.

I mentioned it would be almost pointless to describe what it was like to be brought up in the cauldron of love and care and respect this town fostered in our reunion group. It would also be difficult to express the loving spirit that saturated the room during the last evening of this marvelous event. It would be almost impossible to express the care and hours spent by fellow classmates that continue to live in this amazing community, working for several years to make these two days a truly unforgettable time.

I can say this… From a passing comment made months earlier, a caring heart and mind took the time to create a single XL grey tee shirt carrying a silk screen of my high school on its front. The kindness of that small gesture turned into one of the great gifts of my life, and reflects the character of every one of those gentle folk who more than 50 years ago lived together and were collectively taught the importance of community.

The classmates that organized this event did not give us a reunion; they gave us their love and their hearts. The tee shirt from Carol was an individual reflection of those souls who enriched my life beyond measure over the decades, continuing into this very weekend.

I will wear that old tee shirt until it is done, and based on its long life I expect to wear the new one until I am…

- ted

Twelve kids and a ball...

“But it is our duty, my young friends, to

resist old age; to compensate for its

defects by a watchful care.”

- Marcus Cicero On Old Age

Twelve youngsters, a coach and an assistant were framed in the photograph.

The boys had suited up for a team picture in their gold uniforms, with black piping and numbers. The shorts were short – well above the knee – in the style of the day.  Each had on a pair of horizontally stripped black and gold knee socks over which were cotton, above the ankle, athletic socks, and they ALL wore Converse All Star basketball shoes.

The taller boys knelt in the back with the shorter sitting cross-legged on the floor in the front. It was the Fairmont, West Virginia Junior High School basketball team from the 1961-1962 Season.

Nineteen sixty-two saw the death of actress Marilyn Monroe… Johnny Carson took over the Tonight Show…To Kill a Mockingbird was a popular new film…John Glenn orbited the earth, and there was talk of war with Russia when it was discovered they had secretly decided to place nuclear-armed ballistic missiles on the Island of Cuba.

While the photo was taken straight on, all of the boys and coach were glancing to their left, as though an intruder had unexpectedly entered the gym and interrupted the photo shoot. The style was in vogue at the time, but looking at this gathering of youngsters, it looks a little odd.

Every one of them wanted to be a starter, and every one of them wanted to be a star.  Each kid was sure he had what it took to excel in the game – as they should have. After all, what coach wants ball players who do not want to succeed?

The youngster, in the back on the right, was wearing the number 54, just one digit short of the number of years it has been since those boys sat in that gym, on that street in that town, with little on their minds other than the game and the season ahead of them. 

As the years in the lives of these boys moved on to high school, six or so of them continued to play the game through the Darwinian process of natural selection...that, of course, would be in the future. For now, it was ‘game on.’

The kid in the back row on the far right, number 54, was one of the boys who continued the game in high school. It wouldn’t be until the next level of play that his dreams of collegiate basketball would slip away to more skilled and gifted athletes than he...that youngster was me.

In fact, the fellow right beside me emerged as one of the best high school players in the country; was heavily recruited and had a successful career at North Carolina State University…water they say, finds its level.

There is no memory of the exact number of wins and losses that year, but it was a good year for basketball at Fairmont Junior High School, adding ripples of confidence to the lives of those boys in gold and black.

Sitting at my keyboard and looking at that picture, I suspect none of these kids had any idea, whatsoever, what life might bring to them. There were smiling faces…somber expressions – some confident…some belying uncertainty…tomorrow as far away as the edges of the universe.

Looking at that picture, I tried, unsuccessfully, to tie a piece of ‘mental string’ to that kid wearing number 54 and connect it to the fellow sitting behind his computer screen.

Wandering into the future, I could never have predicted failure to complete university…a war in Southeast Asia…an unexpected successful return to college…graduate school…decades in a religious community…a meaningful professional career…world travel…. small ‘life around the edges’ experiences with the most interesting of people from professional colleagues to taxi drivers, waitresses, hotel workers, companions on airplane flights – none of it – not one single iota suggested the moment the aperture of that camera clicked and fixed those 12 young players in time.

I suppose one might think looking at these kids preparing to play the games that season, and the game of life rushing at them full tilt, would bring feelings of nostalgia…a sense of context…a wondering of ‘what if’ different choices had been made…different roads taken.

In fact, there is none of that. Other than a familiarity with the faces and names, number 54 is just another image of a kid with a sparkle in his eye.

Next week, I will return to Fairmont, West Virginia, for my 50^th high school reunion and see some of those, by now, not so young fellows frozen in time in the 5^th Street Gymnasium.  We will ‘small talk’ about our lives and try to remember some of the experiences we had when we were bound together by a coach, a junior high school, and ‘uniform’ uniforms.

I hope the conversations about the games of yesterday are few…I hope to find out what they have learned from their journey’s to date…I hope they are still playing the game of life and looking forward to ‘season’ ahead.

- ted

Breakfast, photographs and blogs...

“A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into.”

- Ansel Adams, American Photographer

Leah and I, as is often the case, were sitting and gazing into the darkened colorless shades of the early morning, waiting for the earth to rotate another few degrees, bringing the Sonoran desert into a beautiful and richly colored living canvas.

It was a warm morning, with a gentle wind coming from the south, bringing with it the subtle odor of bacon, eggs and syrupy pancakes…the unmistakable smell that, at least for me, turns on a bit of tummy growling, not so subtly reminding me that my engines wouldn’t mind a bit of fueling up.

Wait! Bacon, eggs and pancakes in the desert?? Yes sir, when the morning wind comes from the south, and it does not often do so, it brings with it this understated, yet unmistakable, aroma from Jerry Bob’s, an eatery a couple of hundred yards (.18km) down the road from our neighborhood.

Smell is a powerful memory tool, and brings with it a flood of past life experience, which in this case, made me think of boy scout campouts, breakfasts in the Canadian woods at our family cottage, breakfasts in some greasy spoon after a long and sleepless night somewhere…

Photographs…

The article said that most people do not look at photographs they have taken a second time, unless sharing them with someone else, or reminiscing at the loss of a friend or loved one with whom they had a meaningfully common experience…one sees a lot of this on social media.

I am not certain about ‘most people,’ but this is true for me. I open my photo albums when sending a picture to an old friend, or when I write home during an overseas adventure, but for the most part, my photos sit in an electronic library seldom seeing the light of day. On the odd occasion, I’ll open my photo folders and am reminded of someone dear to my heart and an event shared with them…it is the ‘odd occasion.’

When my sister Nancy was drifting away from us down the slippery slope of Alzheimer’s disease, she spent hours looking at family photographs, almost, I suppose, as if they would act as small anchor points onto which she could hold her mind steady and sanity intact.

When I take pictures, it is because I think I would like to remember the scene in front of me…remember how I felt in the moment the electronic blinking eye captured the scene.

Blogs…

I have been writing this weekly blog for nearly five years.  I began doing so because I thought it would be a platform to work out my philosophy of life…a place where, if I recorded things I was thinking, my life would find better focus…a little more meaning…perhaps anchor points in a world that seems to rush by so quickly that it looks to be ending almost before it began.

As it turns out, I have been writing ‘word photographs’ of life experiences. I suppose, ‘word photographs’ is not exactly what the blogs are…they are much more. They require me to express, in the written word, things I find meaningful.

Each blog is a snapshot of something in life that has caught my attention in some way…something that has touched me.  I am sometimes surprised there seems to be so much, and I am equally surprised at the rather consistent emerging patterns that interest me. 

The patterns became a little more evident, because of the unrelenting enthusiasm of the leader of a writer’s workshop I attend.  Last year, she encouraged me to put some of these blogs into a book, leading to life in small bites – moments in time, a group of 50 or so blogs. Compiling blogs into a manuscript required opening the scrapbook and looking at the verbal photographs that had been stored there.

It was the first time I had reviewed what I had been writing for four years or so.

I am just in the process of finishing a second book, including more of the pieces from the past few years. This, once again, required re-reading blogs in my ‘written scrapbook.’

As it turns out, this process of compiling some of the writings has proved to be instructive and insightful for me. Reviewing these pieces has provided me a deeper insight into the meaning of my life…the kinds of things I seem to consistently write about, have brought about a “…better focus…” and revealed something about my “…philosophy of life…”

While I have had a most amazing professional journey, I have written little about that, because, as it turns out it is the small things that touch me the most…it is the small things that make me feel alive and resonance with the living fabric of humanity - the incidentals that happen all the time in the cracks and crevices of life. They might be a shared moment with stranger on an airplane, a janitor at school, a friend’s child, or small talk with friends or neighbors.

I suppose there are big things to talk about…the places we have been…the chance meeting of a movie star or athlete in an elevator…the things we have seen and the places we have gone on holiday, but for me it is  ‘…life around the edges…’ that have given it meaning, and sitting with Leah in the “…darkened colorless shades of the early morning… bringing the Sonoran desert into a beautiful and richly colored living canvas.”

- ted

A little morning activity

“Exercise should be done for the sake of the 

body, and for the sake of the soul.”

- Anonymous

“Hey Ted, I’m thinking about heading up the hill in the morning. Do you want to go?”

This is the sort of thing that happens when you are semi-retired, and living in a neighborhood that is on the 70% side of retirees.

While I suppose I should consider myself semi-retired, I have never been accused of being retiring…that would be in terms of my personality.

“Listen man, I think I can do it, but I have a call in the morning to Europe. It’s 9 hours ahead of us, and I have to work around my partner’s schedule…it depends how it goes…I’ll let you know.”

A little background…

Dave is my 73+ year old neighbor who keeps himself busy by playing golf, racquet ball, a little weight lifting and a part-time job in a local golf pro shop.  He is one of those guys for whom the expression ‘…slow and easy…’ aptly applies. He does what he wants to, when he wants to do it, and once having set his intention, has the single mindedness of a hungry mountain lion on the hunt.

For example, he used to be a smoker. One day, he tells me, he decided he had enough, and quit…cold turkey…that was it…done. Whatever withdrawals he went through were ‘what they were,’ but he had made a decision and he never smoked again.

He is a beer lover, and one look at his frame, somewhere in the area of 5’6” (165cm), left little doubt he had consumed his fair share. Several months ago, he made the decision that his weight was not healthy. How he came to that conclusion is unknown to me, but over the next few months he lost more than 25 pounds (11.3kg) slowly and deliberately.  Not one to look over his shoulder at yesterday, I have little doubt he will keep the pounds off.

To the point…

“Heading up the hill…” in our relationship, means bicycle riding on a loop that has come to be routine for us. It is not really an exercise event in the conventional sense, but rather a time to hangout and talk about whatever is on our minds. Our pace is actually so slow that occasionally, even some joggers – and this is absolutely true – slip past us.

I have a GPS on my phone that provides data related to speed, distance and elevation changes while on our standard, deliberate route…meaning bathrooms located in strategic places along the way – city parks, local pharmacies and such – that permit us to continue on in as civilized a manner as two very slow moving fellows might enjoy.

I turn the thing on when we head out and off when we return. Our route may vary a little from time to time, but on balance we cover 11miles (17.7km). When we get home, our average speed is typically 8mph (12.8kmh). This, of course, is faster than most folks jog, to be sure, but half of our route is down hill. For Dave, gravity makes the ride worth the effort. He loves those long, gently sloping, downhill coasting…I mean riding…sections of our outings.

There are two other things that have meaning for these bi-monthly events. The first is safety. Tucson is the second most bicycle friendly city in the United States, so a lot of our ride is on designated bike/jogging trails. Secondly, during the summer, this part of the country is very hot. It is not uncommon for our days to be 107f (41.7C) or more. The mornings, on the other hand, are generally very comfortable – high 70s to low 80s [25-29C] – so we try to get the rides started before the oven heats up.

Generally the ride takes 2 to 2.5 hours, depending on the bio breaks along the way and the conversations we have.

In my later years, Molly and I work to remain as healthy as possible. We eat foods that we know support our physical and mental well-being…we exercise fairly hard for our ages, because we know the importance of heart health and being as functional as possible…we sleep well and rest when necessary.

None of this is to say we have a “…what should we do next…” lifestyle. I continue to write and travel and speak…she is busy as a conservation steward monitoring protected State lands in our region against poachers of Native American artifacts, and sitting the board of our neighborhood association, among other things.

We have, however, made a conscious decision to become an active part of our community, something I have not done much of during the past 30 years or so. Riding with Dave is part of that decision.

It’s still pretty early here, but I was able to reschedule that European thing. I’ll wait a few more minutes and then give Dave a call.

It looks like we will be “…heading up the hill…” this morning, and yes, I ‘…want to go…”

- ted