I dreamed I won a marathon

In 1980, I ran the New York City Marathon in 3:42:52. I was 36 years old and weighed 134 lbs. I finished in the middle of the pack of 12,000 runners who partook in the event. You’ll notice I did not use the word competed. I finished to the applause of thousands of strangers, but no one I knew was there to greet me. I drove home alone in my ’76 Maverick and watched Alberto Salazar win it on the six o’clock news.

First Name -- Last Name -- Sex/Age -- Place -- Time --- Pace

ALBERTO ----- SALAZAR --- M22 --------- 1 -------- 2:09:41 -- 4:56

VIRGIL ---------- HERVEY----- M36 --------- 6279 --- 3:42:52 -- 8:30

(1980 results from the official New York Marathon archives)

The next year I developed tendonitis in my right knee during training for a second go at it, ran anyway, and dropped out at the 8 mile mark. I took the subway back to Central Park, arriving in time to see Alberto Salazar cross the finish line in record breaking time. I would never run again.

These days I weigh in at a hefty 200 lbs. Last night I dreamed I won the Chicago Marathon. Maybe it had something to do with the tendonitis I’m developing in my left ankle. The crowd was sparse, but at least Mona was there to cheer me on.

Eight years, a half-a-lifetime

I remember Eisenhower being sworn in for the first time. I watched it on a neighbor’s TV. I was nine years old. I was seventeen and in college when he finished his second term and Kennedy took office. Children, who were nine when Bush fils was sworn in, will be old enough to fight in Iraq by the time his term of office is over. Unfortunately, it looks like they will get that opportunity.

I sat out Vietnam on on an island called Miyako Jima, the “Pearl of the East China Sea.” I was twenty-two and had enlisted in the Coast Guard a full year before American forces got involved in Vietnam, beyond the “advisor” stage. That war ran for more than ten years. Toward the end of the war, young men were dying over there, who couldn’t even recall a time when Vietnam wasn’t synonymous with war, even though it was never officially called one.

I would lay on the roof of the pump shack at the LORAN station on Miyako and watch the B-52s from Okinawa fly over. That was 1967. I was getting a tan. I wouldn’t realize how serious the war was until I got home. It ran another eight years. During that time, I finished college and law school, had my first child, and represented hundreds of accused criminals for the Legal Aid Society in New York City. It seemed like a lifetime.

And now about my foot

A little over four weeks ago, I stepped out my front door to warm up Mona’s car before she left for work and stepped on a well-camouflaged patch of ice. It seems weird talking about a wintery day’s accident when we almost hit 80 yesterday, but that’s how it is in Ohio. We are bordered by Canada on the north and Kentucky on the south.

It happened just as I was turning to go back into the house to get the keys that I had forgotten. As I started to slip, the left ankle buckled in and I heard and felt something snap. Visions of Fred Schenck flashed through my head as I went down. Fred had a similar fall on his way to church a couple years back and was in a cast for over a year. I also had visions of me hemorrhaging money in the waiting room of some orthopedic surgeon.

I crawled back into the house shouting, “Help me! Help me!” I knew no one had seen me fall. Inside they were getting ready for work and school. Mona got me a bag of ice and dropped the kid on her way to work. They were both running late. I was left to my own resources.

I didn’t think I had a fracture, but I thought I would know better after I had iced it for twenty minutes. I tested it when I was done. No shooting pains, but I couldn’t put weight on it. I needed a cane. I remembered a long broomstick we had in the laundry room. I crawled down the stairs and hopped across the laundry room to where I knew it was. It wasn’t the solution I had hoped it would be. It was awkward and hard to grip. I used it to get back upstairs. I called Angie Schenck to see if Fred was done with Jack Birch’s old cane. She dropped it off and suggested I see a doctor. By this time, I was pretty sure it was only a sprain. “Sprains can be worse than fractures,” she said. Oh boy, just what I needed to hear.

So here we are, almost a month later. I thought I’d be healed in two weeks. With daily heat treatments and ibuprofen, I’m almost better, but I keep doing stupid things to impede my recovery. A few days ago, I felt almost 100% cured. So I mowed the front lawn, which was rapidly becoming the neighborhood eyesore. That night the ankle was sore again. The next morning it was not so good. I babied it again for a couple days and got back to where it was pretty good again. Walter and I spent the morning in Springfield, where I walked all around Office Depot, Wal*mart and Mier. Then last night, Lucy wouldn’t go back in her cage to sleep and I had to chase her all over the house. This morning it is sore again.

In a few days we will be going to Florida, where I had hoped to get in a little tennis. A week after we get back, we are leaving for three weeks in Asia, where I will walk for miles and miles. Last week we went to the flea market, where I found this really neat made-in-China cane for five bucks. I told Mona it looks so cool, I might just continue to use it after I am better.

So here’s my question: Are they going to let me bring this cane on the plane?










-Harry

Along the bike path

The man was riding his bicycle along a bike path in Southwest Ohio. He had ridden ten miles to the next town. There he had lunched at a picnic table on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich washed down with ice tea he had brought along in a plastic bottle. He had read a copy of the local paper with particular interest in the "Help Wanted" and "Apartments for Rent" sections. Then he rode his bike back again as far as this spot, which was still about a mile from the small house he had rented a few weeks before.

The scenery along the way from Serena to Hollowbrook is particularly appealing for its many variations. The trail threads its way through the one town, past a park with a duck pond, close to a two lane highway, then into the woods, past farms, then more woods, and past an old college, before finally coming into the center of the other town.

At this point on the return trip, the path was getting close to the road again and there was nothing in between, but an expanse of freshly mown grass. The lane of on-coming traffic, headed North, was closest to the path. Cars and trucks whizzed by, exceeding the speed limit of 55 mph.

The man was pedalling along at a pretty good pace of his own. His head was down with his helmet into the wind. The sun was high and there was no shade in this open area. Although he had been looking down, not ahead, and not in the direction of the road off to his right, he sensed a vehicle which was travelling faster than the others, swerving somewhat as it came around the gentle curve in the road. It must have been the sound of the loud engine that had warned him initially. He knew he shouldn't have, but could not resist looking up.

"Asshole!" a man shouted from the passenger seat of a truck as it passed him. It was a rusty, well-dented pickup, carrying a couple of young rednecks. The passenger had his head out the window, hooting and hollering as they continued on, roaring up the road.

The man quickly resumed his downward gaze. He thought, hell, I know what I am, but it makes me wonder what he is that he thinks he has to point it out to me. Well anyway, I didn't give him the satisfaction of reacting. I wonder if he feels better, now.

He started to think about himself, about his situation with the woman, something he had managed to avoid for almost twenty miles of solitary cycling. It's hard to argue with someone when they're not rational, someone who's not on the same intellectual wavelength, someone who is so damned insecure that she looks at your own sense of security and can think of nothing better to call it than selfishness. Her emotions had been taking them around in circles, her own arguments contradicting themselves, and she refusing to see it. For instance, when she said that giving his wife his share to the house and the rights to his pension and just packing up and leaving with nothing for himself was "so damn selfish." Go figure! All he'd wanted was to be alone.

Then she had tracked him down. And she was all contrite. She told him that she not only understood why he had done what he had done, but she thought it was the right thing for him to do and had actually congratulated him on finally taking back control of his life. Of course, she had been pressing him to divorce his wife for years, but never understood the legalities, what in New York they call "equitable distribution," an intricate legal concept that was further complicated by his wife's disability.

She told him she still wanted to be part of his life, wanted to move out to Ohio with him and start all over again. He'd warned her that she'd have to change. She'd said that she would do anything to be with him. He should have known better.

There were signs of trouble, even before she joined him. She called him every night. And every night, he made it clear that this is what he would be doing, with her, or without her. One time, when she asked him what he had done alone in his apartment all day, he tried to explain about the writing, rewriting, editing. Her response was, "You might as well, while you have this time to yourself, before the kids and I move out there." He tried to impress it upon her. "This is what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life. Get it?" He'd thought she had gotten it. Now, whenever he reminded her about their understanding, it was as if she had never understood. She must have thought he had been pulling a power-play, and that, now, she had the power. But it wasn't about power. As far as he was concerned, no one had any power.

"What if something happens to me, if I get sick or something?" she had asked him last night. "Are you going to send my kids back to their father and just take off and leave me?" "I'd never do that," he told her. "Why not?" she said. "You did that to your wife." Suddenly, out of all the irrationality and anger, there emerged a rational thought with enough force to pull all the other crazy ideas together into a cogent argument. It was a projectile, fired straight and true. It slammed into him with a deadening thud.

"Asshole!"

The man had come to a place where a dirt road crossed the bike path. An old pickup truck was blocking the trail in front of him. The two occupants, large unshaven men in flannel shirts and dirty overalls, had gotten out and were standing next to the truck, leaning on baseball bats.

The man applied his brakes and brought the bike to a stop.

"Did you think you could just ignore us and keep pedalling on your merry way?" He thought it was the one who had shouted to him from the road.

The two men raised their bats and started toward him.

The man got off his bike. He removed his helmet and turned to face them. Then he told them the same thing he had said to the woman the night before. "Go right ahead, if you think it will make you feel better."

Still Sad

Baby is still sad, crying a lot, sitting alone, very testy with poor little Lucy. The only way I can cheer her up is to let her ride around on my shoulder.

-Harry

Gone but almost forgotten

Baby & Kiki

“If it weren’t for Baby, Kiki would never be so tame.” Those were my words on Saturday morning as we were eating breakfast and playing with the birds. We had an unusual situation, raising a hand-fed, clipped-winged parrotlet and a supermarket parakeet together in the same cage. They slept cuddled up together and preened each other and had become the best of friends. They were inseparable.

Baby’s flight feathers had grown back, but she retained her cuddly, sweet personality. She would fly to me and sit on my shoulder and ride around with me all day, if I’d let her. Once Kiki saw this, he started to do the same thing, only with a tad more timidity. It became so commonplace that sometimes I would forget that I was walking around the house with two birds on my shoulders. This went on for months.

Before these two, we’d had a parakeet named Bobo, whom we’d put out on the deck in her cage on nice days. One day, last fall, she escaped and we never saw her again. Shortly thereafter, we visited Penny’s Parrots at the flea market and saw a parrotlet for the first time. A parrotlet, a member of the Amazon family, is the smallest true parrot. They are about the size of a parakeet, without the long tail. They also have a much bigger beak. We ordered a female. It would be a few weeks before they had a hand-raised one that was mature enough to bring home. Meanwhile, it was back to the supermarket where we saw and fell in love with Kiki.

We had Kiki for a couple weeks before they called us to say that Baby was ready to come home. By this time, Kiki had been finger trained had become a pretty good pet. We could let him out of the cage with the confidence that he would return when he was hungry. Failing that, he would be easy enough to coax in.

When we first brought Baby home, we kept them in separate cages. They started calling to each other on the first day. After a few days, we let Kiki out and he flew over to Baby’s cage and started to court her. At first she tried to bite his feet through the bars, but eventually, they started to kiss. It wasn’t long before Kiki moved into Baby’s cage.

Back to Saturday: Mona thought it would be nice it the birds got some fresh air. Can you feel it? Can you feel that impending sense of doom that I felt when I first learned of her intentions? I had to go to the post office. When I returned I was greeted with, “I have some bad news for you.”

My heart sank. I knew that at least one of the birds was gone. As it turned out, it was Kiki. Mona had tried cleaning the cage, outside, with the birds in it. Kiki had been nervous about being outside in the first place. As soon as Mona opened the door, he burst past her and flew into a big tree in the neighbor’s yard. Soon he was lost. I got out the binoculars and started calling for him. I thought that having Baby out there with us in the cage, calling too, might help. Nothing!

It was just like when we lost Bobo, but this time we had a new consideration. Baby had never been alone. From the time she was hatched, she had always been around other birds. She already seemed lost. We decided that we had to get another bird immediately. So it was off to Penny’ Parrots, where we found a smart little yellow parakeet we call Lucy. We’ve had her for two days and, with a lot of help from Baby, she is almost finger trained. They are already sharing a cage and preening each other.


So it is my pleasure to introduce to you our newest pet, and Baby’s new friend, Lucy! By the way, we are pretty sure Lucy is a girl, but if she turns out to be a boy, we will call him Lucky. So for now, it is Lucky Lucy.

-Harry

Thunderbangers at 4:00 a.m.

The weatherman got it right this time. I woke up wondering if it was bombers from Wright-Patt or F-18s from the Air National Guard. Then I remembered the forecast on the 11 o’clock news.

As a cold war kid growing up with elementary school air-raid drills, a thunderstorm like last night’s would have had me listening for the sirens. Imagine that, an innocent child afraid of bombs from the sky! Imagine a country devastated by hurricanes, tornados, and earthquakes – bombed out houses, bodies everywhere in the streets. Imagine if we had the power and the will to tame the storm.

With one foot in the air

These women…
They’re too old for me,
I think
as I lay here
with my left foot elevated
next to my cane.
I am reading my alumni magazine,
searching for names
followed by years,
remembering how they were,
dreaming
of younger women
not so far away.

In Ohio

I live in Ohio,
not by accident of birth,
but by choice, the heartland
over the coastal megalopolis.
I am a veteran, a tax payer,
and a voter
in small-town Ohio.

I saw two parades today,
here in Ohio,
each with its silent
procession of Marines
in dress blues,
dozens of police cars,
lights flashing without sirens,
long black limos
and a horse-drawn hearse.
Two in one day,
the third I’ve attended
in just one month.

Here in Ohio…

This is what you call
hitting home.

When Sadaam attacked Kuwait
I thought we were right
to intervene.

When Sadaam complained
that the children of Iraq
were starving, I took note
of his dozens of castles and said
don’t lay this at our door.
We had him under our thumb
and I agreed.

But whenever anyone suggested that,
unprovoked,
we should violently intervene
in the internal affairs
of another country
in the name of human rights,
I wondered about our own
questionable history.
Where was the Axis of Evil
when we were ethnic cleansing,
hanging our own citizens
for the color of their skin?

Shock and awe..?
Let me engage for a moment
in a bit of sacrilege:
This war is illegal, ill conceived,
and poorly carried out.
This war is the screw-up
of a screw-up president
and his politician friends.
We have gone from WMDs
to the nine-eleven connection,
from ousting a dictator,
to installing a democracy
in a land that doesn’t want one,
when it’s really about oil, Israel,
and Dubuyah’s personal agenda.

Close to two thousand
Americans dead,
another fifteen thousand wounded,
and so many Iraqi casualties
no one can count them.
“Victory is ours!” Bush proclaimed
nearly two years ago
and they’re talking about another year,
another eight billion dollars,
another who-knows-how-many lives…

Who the hell are we
to attack another country
without provocation?
The last super power?
The leader of the free world?
Who is setting the example,
the invaders?
If they came here,
they’d be calling me insurgent!

Why Ohio..?
Why so many young soldiers
fighting in a sandstorm
half-way around the world
from Ohio..?
Because we keep our mouths shut
and grieve in silence?
The last time we protested
the same kind of screw-up,
the Governor sent in troops
and twelve lay dead
in Kent,
hitting home
in Ohio.

We are a safe state.
We are in the President’s column.
As Ohio goes,
so goes the nation.

There will be more parades in Ohio
today
and tomorrow.
The newscasters will interview
friends and relatives,
all who want to believe
these kids died for a cause.
We are a red state,
the one that put the President
over the top.
No one wants to say it…
No one wants to believe it…
But this is just one big screw-up!
They died because of a screw-up.

The government won’t allow pictures
of the coffins.
They tend to dishearten the citizenry.
They may be able to stop the photographs
of the neat rows of flag-draped boxes
in the bellies of C-130s,
but they can’t stop
the parades.

They can’t stop
that funeral procession
coming soon
to a town near you.

August 14, 2005

First one thing happens

First one thing happens, then another, and another, and before you know it, you’ve come full circle. Only, in this case, having completed the circumference, I find myself with an extra bicycle, a small dent in the driver’s side front fender of my ’94 Taurus wagon, and an honorable mention in the “Village Police Report.” Someone up there must be smiling.

It was a Sunday morning. Everyone else in the house was still asleep. I hadn’t been to church in awhile, so I showered, shaved, put on my long pants and got ready to leave. It was a nice day. I decided to ride my bike. In the process of transferring the junk from the pockets of my shorts, I considered not bringing my car keys. I wouldn’t need them, but I decided to bring them anyway. You never know…

Despite the many warnings from my wife, I was in the habit of leaving my bike under the eaves in front of my converted garage. Two-and-a-half years without incident, but on this occasion, when I came out the bike was gone. This was a ten-speed that I’d had for thirty years. The seat and the handle bars had been adjusted that long ago. I’d bought it new in Maine from my ex-brother-in-law, who was running a failing sporting goods store in Kennebunkport. I’d ridden it in Maine, New York, and Ohio. I can’t imagine how many miles. I never felt the need for change, except for the occasional flat.

I felt for the car keys in my pocket. If they hadn’t been there, I would probably have gone back inside and stayed there. I wondered about that little voice in my head as I drove to Sunday worship. After church, I paid a visit to the police dispatcher and Sergeant Nipper was called in from the field to take my report. ‘What’s the value?” he asked. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. I paid $125 for it new. With a little luck, I could have gotten twenty-five bucks for it at a garage sale.” “Don’t worry, I’ll find it!” he said.

On Tuesday I stopped by the police department. The weather was great, the gas prices were on the rise, and I was getting antsy. On Thursday, I checked the newspaper. Sure enough, it had made the police report. On Friday I visited the dispatcher again – nothing. I had conducted my own search, figuring some kid had needed a ride on Saturday night, borrowed my bike, and ditched it somewhere. I’d been to a number of local bike racks and even searched some thick bushes where I thought it might have been left. Nothing! I started thinking about getting another bike, perhaps a new one with 15, 18, or 21 speeds. What for, I wondered, I only use two or three around town. Maybe I’d get me some kind of flashy cruiser, with fenders and a headlight, something like the bike from “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.” Who needs gears?

On Monday I had a bunch of errands to run in Xenia. It had been more than a week. Somewhere on my shopping list I had entered the word “bike.” As I was driving down North Detroit Street, I spotted a house with about 50 bicycles on the front lawn. This is a kind of Xenia tradition, people selling bikes off their lawn. I decided to check it out on my way back out of town. Who knew, maybe I’d find my own bike. I wondered what I would do.

My errands done, I found myself pacing up and down the two rows, examining the corroding artifacts like some kind of bicycle anthropologist. One rusty three-speed “Free Spirit” coaxed a snicker. The quintessential Yellow Springs bike, I thought. A Mongoose in the second row caught my eye – too flashy? – I wasn’t sure. A bike can say a lot about a person. No one came out of the house to greet me, but there was a phone number on a makeshift sign. I dialed it on my cell phone and ten minutes later the lady of the house was there to help me.

The bikes in the front row were five bucks apiece. Those in the back were from fifteen to twenty-five. The Mongoose was in the back row, but I’d noticed a shimmy in the rear hub while I was waiting. The Free Spirit was in the front row. I’d examined it more closely and decided that all it might need is a new set of tires and a can of WD-40. “I’ll take this one.” The woman looked at me a little funny. “I’m from Yellow Springs,” I explained. She smiled and nodded.

I threw the bike in the wagon and started to back out of the narrow driveway into the heavy traffic on North Detroit. When there was finally a break in the flow, I gunned it and cut my wheel sharply. I was so concentrated on the traffic to my right that I failed to notice the telephone pole close on my left. The ensuing crunch got my attention. The price of the bike suddenly went up. I checked the damage in the Groceryland parking lot.

By early afternoon I’d adjusted the seat, pumped up the tires, and applied heavy doses of WD-40 just about everywhere. I got on and rode it around the block. I found a broken spoke that I’d failed to notice in my initial inspection, but it didn’t seem to matter. I grabbed my backpack and rode it into town, taking Corry Street to the Post Office, and then on to my office on Dayton Street. I was beginning to fall in love with my new found treasure. What a smooth ride..! Perhaps a paint job and some shiny new wheels…

I decided to take the bike path on my way back home. As I passed the bike rack at the south end of the cabooses, something caught my eye. I jammed on the brakes and turned to look back. It was my bike! I examined it, not a scratch, nothing missing. I locked up my new-old bike and rode the old-old one home. On the way I thought about how the five dollar bike had been like a divining rod in the way it had led me to my lost bike. If I hadn’t bought it, I never would have been on the bike path and probably never would have found my stolen bike.

“I hope you learned your lesson,” my wife said. “What are you going to do with that rusty five dollar bike?” She protested when I told her I planned to leave it in front of the garage. “I don’t want that ugly thing in front of my house!” But who knows, maybe it will bring us more luck. As they’ve been saying a lot on TV lately, everything happens for a reason.