Course Record

Knowing that there was an end to the mindless churning of arms and legs helped. At each point that despair began to creep maliciously into my mind, I looked down the road for the next mile marker. The first one didn't make a difference. I was feeling fine and ready to run all day. The sun was out, and I was running in a T-shirt and shorts. My foul weather gear had been left behind with our thermos, snack bars, and sundry items for comfort or relief.
Part of our family post-Thanksgiving ritual. Get the lights up. Watch a lot of football. Run ten kilometers. This is how I consoled myself as I looked for mile two and three. Who was I trying to impress? I run all the time without all this organization. I don't need kids in orange vests waving flags at me to show me the way. I could just keep running straight off this course if I wanted to. If I wanted to. I could slow down and walk if I wanted to. I was going to see my wife and son on their way back from their five kilometer course. It would look bad for me to be walking. It would look bad if I just stopped.
Where was that mile three marker?
Then the community of runners took over. The mile markers didn't matter. I was out there with my pace group. This was the "about an hour" crew. We were having our Sunday stroll in and around the park. I wouldn't stop if I was past the half-way point. Three point one miles would put me over that edge. I shook it off and focused on the road in front of me.
I thought about the guy I used to work with installing office furniture. "You're a runner?" he asked me with a little too much surprise. "How fast do you run?"
I told him I wasn't exactly sure, since I really only timed myself when I ran my yearly race.
"Don't you want to know?" He couldn't imagine my lack of interest.
I told him that ever since my knee surgery, now some twenty years in the past, the idea of running at any pace for more than three miles seemed like the goal I was most concerned. The cloud that was this memory burst and I moved on, past the sign for mile four. Running the whole way. Slow and steady wins the race. That's what I tell the kids at school when we practice our mile run.
Now I was two-thirds there. I listened hard to the music that was in my ears, shutting out the protestations of my muscled and ligaments. I was enjoying the feeling of being able to run six miles. Ten kilometers. An hour. At mile five, I was going up a hill, and I passed a few who had slipped that gear. They would find it coming down on the other side, but I wanted to be up and over that last rise.
I didn't time my last big kick well, and the last hundred yards to the finish line were done under duress, but they were done. My wife and son were there to greet me. They gave me a bottle of water. They asked me how I did, and I looked back at the clock. "About an hour." I panted, "but I ran the whole way."

Car Care

I looked at my wife, and I thought she might cry. She had traveled miles and waited for nearly a year to see what was in front of her. It was the Nissan Leaf. For a woman who has championed her own "homemade hybrid," a way to limit her own idling time while stuck in traffic and who hopes someday to be able to power her own motor vehicle from the energy she collects via the solar panels on her roof, this was a slice of heaven. "It doesn't have a tailpipe!" she enthused as tears welled in her eyes.
We were at the Fifty-Second Annual International Car Show. We were there, ostensibly, to placate my son's deep-seated automobile urges. We came to see the Porsches and the Maseratis. We took pictures of the Camaros and the Corvettes. It was all about the fetishment of four wheels. My wife, who was born in Detroit, understands her son and was able to wrangle an opportunity for my son to sit inside a half-million dollar Lamborghini. That was his tearful moment. I tried to imagine meeting Bruce Springsteen, and I had something to compare it to. Surrounded by all that Italian machinery, he was a new car smell's breath away from paradise. I watched my wife struggle with the worries of a planet being slowly destroyed by the continued use of fossil fuels versus the love for her son. Seven miles a gallon?
But when it was all said and done, there was enough hybrid and hydrogen technology on display to temper the experience. I watched all of this with an odd sense of detachment. Both my son and wife have asked me what my favorite car was. I have an affection for all the cars that I have driven into the used car lot on their last legs just to trade them in for my next used car. Favorite? That level of appreciation doesn't register with me. I look at these four-wheeled vehicles as less-than-inspired variations on a theme. The emotional attachments I could imagine could only be culled from fantasy: The Batmobile, James Bond's Aston Martin, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
I understand how potentially amusing a sports car that can go one hundred and eighty-five miles an hour could be. I appreciate the way that driving cars without tailpipes would make our planet more inhabitable. Then I notice how I am walking around the Car Show. On my own two feet. And when we were done, we went back to the BART station to take public transportation back home.

He'll Be Back (Taxes)

I knew a guy who, whenever tax time came around and he was forced to write a check to his government for services nominally rendered, he would make a point of writing in the memo line: "To The (expletive) IRS." It wasn't much of a protest, but it made him feel better. I don't have a great deal of empathy for his experience, since I tend to imagine that we as a society get the government that we deserve, and paying for it is just part of the program.
Then there's this: Our Governator is apparently just a little behind on his taxes. When I say "little," it's a matter of perspective. For action-movie-megastar cum Republican-voice-of-moderation and millionaire several times over, a mere pittance. To me, a public school teacher in the state where Arnold is in charge of a swelling budget deficit, seventy-nine thousand dollars feels like a couple years' work. The IRS filed a federal tax lien against the governor last spring. Schwarzenegger's office blames on "a minor paperwork tracking discrepancy." Like maybe he "forgot" to send that check in. Or maybe he forgot to deduct those trips to the gym as medical expenses. Perhaps he's just not that good at math. That seems more likely, since California's deficit will balloon to nearly twenty-one billion dollars over the next year and a half. Again, with place value problems like that, tens of thousand of dollars seem like mere annoyances. Paperwork problems. He probably forgot to get a W-2 from Jim Cameron for "Terminator 3" or something. He's busy keeping the Golden State safe for democracy and freedom.
And the tyranny of the taxman. That's right Arnie! Stick it to the man, even if it turns out that you happen to be that man. Or relentless cyborg from the future.

RSVP

The pitch would go something like this: "America's Favorite Terrorists. Each week, we see how close one lucky couple can get to bringing about armed insurrection and rioting in the streets." It sounds a lot like something from Paddy Chayevsky's "Network," with the"Ecumenical Liberation Army" working for a thirty share as they plot their next assassination on LIVE TV!
Michaele and Tareq Salahi are not, in the strictest sense, terrorists. These two are the ones who gained access to the dinner President Barack Obama hosted for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday, although they had not been invited. Aside from this being extremely bad manners, it is also prompting a security review by the Secret Service, which acknowledged that procedures were not followed properly. Did I mention that they were being followed earlier in the evening by a camera crew? Apparently these two Virginia socialites decided that pretending that their child was lost in a foil balloon would be too easy to dismiss. Why not crash a state dinner? They told the people with the cameras, Half Yard Productions, that they were invited. It's not the Salahis fault that nobody thought to check their credentials or to see if they were actually on the guest list.
Or if they were, in fact, terrorists bent on the destruction of our American Way Of Life. What if they had been focused on black ops, instead of creating a flurry of photo ops? What if they had smuggled poison into the crudite? Held a broken bottle to the neck of the Vice President? What if they bragged about it on Facebook?
Well, they did do that last one. And in the end, that's what they will be found guilty: Lack of humility. Turn off the cameras boys. Show's over. For now.

Thankful For The Way Things Turned Out

There are times when it's really difficult to be politically correct. Thanksgiving is one of those times. We sit around and wallow in our ample good fortune, even as we share with those with less. Much less. We're celebrating the harvest feast the Plymouth colonists shared with the Wampanoag tribe. It was more than just bringing in a good crop, the Pilgrims were fabulously relieved to have survived to see the spread before them. The one we call the "First" was just the one that got the most press. Squanto, the Native American interpreter who learned his English while he was enslaved in Europe, also taught the colonists to catch eels and grow corn. I'm thankful that eel didn't have the staying power of a stuffed turkey. It was in the spirit of cooperation and understanding that brought everyone to the table back in 1621.
In 1610, there were Wampanoag. When the harvest rolled around sixty-seven years later, four hundred were left. So much for the spirit of cooperation and understanding. Four hundred years later, that number has crept up to just a touch over two thousand. And now the tribe would very much like to build a casino near Cape Cod. The current deal doesn't allow for the first bet to be placed until 2012. If that other nearly extinct tribe of Mayans can be trusted, that won't give the gambling public much of a shot at getting lucky. Well, at least they'll get a chance to check out the buffet. Try the eel.

Potential Energy

Before I went off on my vacation, a number of my fellow teachers asked if I had any "big plans." "No," I assured them, "I'm going to stay close to home. Lay low." Now, three days into my week off, I wonder how I could actually accomplish this.
While it is true that I found the time to finish the entire medium level of "Guitar Hero: Van Halen," I don't know if I have been laying especially low. I have yet to sleep much past seven in the morning, partly due to the insistence of my dog, and mostly due to the extraordinarily rigid circadian rhythm that rules my sleeping and waking worlds.
If I slept in, I might have missed the morning news. Or I might not have been able to wash and dry two loads of laundry. I might not have been able to scrub the bathtub clean. I could have missed out on a run before noon. There were trips to the store, and groceries to put away. And there was my everlasting Albatross of a front gate to contend with. None of these things, including the added task of moving into my new computer, could have been accomplished without the "free time" I was allowed during these past few days.
A few years ago, conventional wisdom suggested that our school district could save money by giving us all a week off, rather than teaching to near-empty classrooms for the three days preceding Thanksgiving. Now I find myself in a mild panic, wondering how to fill those hours that would normally be spent in the service of others. How to be useful and relax at the same time, I wonder. The problem is that I don't tend to find that lethargic rhythm until I've been "resting" for at least two weeks, and by then it's time to pick up my shovel and helmet and head back to the mines.
Happily, the next few days bristle with opportunities such as pie-making and Christmas light installation. By next Monday, I should be ready for the relative peace of the classroom. Now there's a relaxing notion.

New Clear Day

Raise your hand if you remember Three Mile Island. Residents of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania excluded. Extra points if you can name the movie that was release just two weeks prior to that little snafu. Special bonus if you can name any of the artists that performed at the anti-nuke concert just a few months later. Back in 1979, it was the next big threat. We weren't worried about terrorists as much as the nuclear power plant up the road melting down.
So imagine my surprise when I open up the news and find that radioactive dust emanated from reactor cooling system pipes. This accident is still waiting to happen? Didn't they have to shut the whole thing down thirty years ago when things went so terribly wrong? In a word, no. In a few more: The central Pennsylvania plant has two reactors. One suffered a partial meltdown in 1979 and is mothballed. The other is still in use, but has been shut down since last month so steam generators could be replaced.
The radioactive dust was stirred up from a steam pipe that was cut by workers at the plant. Plant spokesman Ralph DeSantis said Monday that the public was not endangered Saturday. Unless you count those dozen workers were exposed to radiation as "the public." And while we're at it, just what does it mean to "mothball" a nuclear reactor? We turned it off and nobody every goes over there, except to get snacks out of the vending machine. It's the one that still has Clark bars in it.
But really, I would be so very happy if there was such a thing as safe nuclear energy, but history doesn't necessarily point in that direction. I liken it to the line that I tend to draw when it comes to home improvement projects. I am willing to do most plumbing tasks, and if I mess it up, I might end up getting wet. I shy away from electrical challenges, since making a mistake there I could end up getting dead. And that's the way I feel about nuclear "accidents." Accidents are generally in the "whoops" category. Chain reactions and Strontium-90 exceed the casual whoops. These incidents tend to fall into the "disaster" file. Unless you happen to work for Mister Burns in Springfield.