Can’t we have a statute of limitations?

Because he’s such a dead-pull hitter, opposing teams have been throwing a shift at David Ortiz, in which the shortstop (sometimes the third baseman) moves into short right field. The other night Big Papi hit a looper that would normally have dropped into short right for a base hit, but it was fielded on one short hop by the shifted fielder and he was thrown out at first. This jolted me with a horrible memory flash of paleozoic teen baseball, slapping an outside pitch into roughly the same place, an easy and obvious base hit without a shifted fielder. But I loafed up the line, the right fielder charged hard...and I was thrown out at first. Oh the mortification. Thinking about it even now makes my skin crawl.

So David, just hit ’em over everybody from now on and save me further memorembarrassment.

Go Sox!

The magic of the mile

Sitting on a shelf downstairs is an audio book—already read but borrowed from the library for car trips—called, The Perfect Mile. It’s about Roger Bannister, John Landy, Wes Santee, and their quest to be the first to run four minutes. (It’s actually a bit of a stretch to include Santee, because he was busy running multiple events for his college track team. But he was American, and the U.S. is a big market....) I’ve always deeply admired Bannister, and loved Landy for his profound decency. And just try this on:



What a great, great race. At the time, they were the only two men in the world who had run four minutes, and they didn’t fool around: they both broke the barrier. Each ran to his strength and put everything he had into it. Landy actually succeeded in a way. He took the sting out of Bannister’s kick, which resulted in a mere 60-second final lap and a pretty thorough collapse at the finish. But Landy himself couldn’t quite keep up the pace. I’ve always thought the famous “Landy turned the wrong way” moment was interesting but unrelated to the result. Tremendous courage and determination from both men.

Seeing the audio book and watching this YouTube got me thinking once again about the wonderfulness—the perfection—of the mile as a competitive distance. The U.S. went fully metric on the track some years ago, but high schools (at least the high schools around here) run 1,600 meters rather than the world-standard 1,500, and although it’s about 10 yards short, it reasonably approximates the real deal, which I assume is the point. With that impulse in mind, I think it would have been much better to have raised a middle finger to the metric zealots on this particular issue and simply carried on with the classic.
 
The mile is special partly because its constituent parts are themselves memorable goals. Four laps on a quarter-mile track, with a minute for each being a natural and elegant (if, on laps three and four, seldom-achieved) goal. For reasonably strong runners growing into their sport, it was: 1. “A minute for a lap? Okay.” 2. “Two minutes for two laps? Well, all right.” 3. “Three minutes for three laps? Erk.” 4. Four minutes for four laps? Are you kidding me?”

Then, of course, you get old, and search for entirely different sorts of miling magic. 

October 1, 1945

Today would have been my parent’s 68th anniversary. When I was little I used to insist that I was at their wedding (it was really my Uncle Bob’s, I think). They’d laugh and say maybe I had been, but they didn’t remember seeing me there. My mom, especially, laughed all the time. You know you’ve got great parents when your house is the place your friends want to be.

Sooo happy

I was in Concord for a few days, mostly trying to finish up the painting in the attic conversion. (Which is looking pretty good, finally.) On Sunday, I was enticed to the hills. H chose Belknap, which has an old fire tower (B loves fire towers), and is a mountain we've wandered up before. Here I am there with B in October, 2009...

...and here we are, low on the mountain, yesterday.

She and I have a little ritual, in which I say, “I love you about...seven.” She says, “No, M.” I say, “Well, maybe 12.” She says, feigning petulance, “No, M. “You love me soooo much!” I say, “Sooo much? How much is that?” To which she has been answering something like, “It’s a lot, lot, lot.” But yesterday she had a new answer: “It’s beyond any number. It’s infinity!”

Which shows you what a couple of weeks of school can do. Anyway, I love her a lot, lot, lot.

B also took a picture of me with the first little girl I loved soooo much. (I love Jasper the Wonderdog, too, but somewhere short of the end of numbers.)

And here I am almost passing out with infinite delight.

Family weekend away

We’re in Freeport, Maine, to support H and A, who are racing in the Lobsterman Tri tomorrow morning. Earlier, we were all crossing the street in slightly wet and wooly conditions when our umbrella got blown into premature decrepitude. B: “That certainly was a strong gust of wind.” Later she counted to six for us in Spanish (I think this is a Montessori thing and I know my grandfather would have been very proud indeed, though for him “cinco” was pronounced “thinco”). Of course, she also flipped out at bedtime, threw a minor fit,  pulled her jammies off and stomped around uttering maledictions. So Miss Crankypants is still in there, along with that funny smart person. By and large, though I admit to a certain empathy with Miss Crankypants, I prefer the funny smart person.

I’m pretty sure that’s who this is, doing something incisive and nuanced with numbers.

Our schoolgirl

Sweet B starts kindergarten Monday. Last weekend, we went to Massachusetts to celebrate our niece’s engagement, and B displayed the engineering gene she’s inherited from her dad. She and a grown-up helper or two constructed this elaborate set of chutes, and performed highly technical experiments to align all the elements properly. Mom was called into play solely to keep the marbles that landed in the tray from popping back out.

A brief consultation...

The marbles (three, I think) dropped into the hopper...

 Around and around they go...

 Success!

And a graceful acceptance of applause from the dress circle.

So come Monday, she’s ready to roll.

Deus ex machina

Years and years ago, I often ran workouts that I called “Rockers,” pushing hard for a half-mile or so to the top of the road we then lived on, which was a well-pitched hill, recovering by jogging slowly down the other side, then turning and pushing up again, back and forth. Hill-running for me was always a sort of magic potion, and this was a way to efficiently get a good bit of it in toward the end of a shortened training run. One day, I’d just gotten to the top and had down-shifted to a little jog, when a dog—an Afghan Hound of all things, a beast I’d never seen before—appeared from behind a neighbor’s house and headed toward me. I knew immediately that he meant business. Runners learn to tell. This guy wasn’t loping toward me to bark and get scratched. He was  hunting me down. I didn’t have time to feel scared. I’d read somewhere that the thing to do when you’re attacked by a dog is to jam your arm down its throat and choke it. So I’m standing there, in my chop top and short shorts, ready to make my stand and thinking to myself, “Oh, shit, this is going to be bad.”

When, all of a sudden (isn’t that a great phrase?), the door pops open on a pickup truck parked by the side of the road, a man with a tire iron jumps out, he bashes the dog, and I’m saved. This whole event takes less than 10 seconds. The adrenaline surge hits me, I realize how terrified I’d been, and I can barely stand up long enough to say thank you and stagger away home. Bless you, Lee King.