Movies That Matter

When I was just a young sprout in the fourth grade, we used to have these competitions where all the kids got in two lines and the two people in the front of the line had to answer a spelling challenge.  The loser got to sit down and watch the rest of the kids do their challenges while the winner went to the next round and that sucked because I lost more often than I won so I spent a lot of time in my chair, watching the other kids trying to spell "squirrel" or "popsicle".  Anyway, there was this girl named Theresa Thomas that won every time and I hated her for it.  She never lost.  Maybe she was nice, maybe she wasn't, I have no idea.  I just know I hated her.  Spelling freak.  

And, and, AND the teacher was showing a good deal of bias against me and towards her because Theresa could spell "apple" without thinking about it.  She just spit it out without so much as a backwards glance.  She just spit out the letters A P P L E like it was nothing.  I had to pause and go back and ask for a timeout and hope that you did spell "apple" with an R.

One day,  this kid in my class that nobody liked convinced his Mom to shuttle his old, raggy looking cat and her bastard kittens to school a few weeks after the kittens were hatched for show and tell. Apparently, this kid thought if he brought something spectacular to school to share, like a batch of illegitimate kittens, it would help augment his lowly social standing. He was wrong. He just didn't understand the whole show and tell fourth grade social ladder thing. It's pretty complex, but it goes something like this:

Bring in a pet snake – plus 3

Bring in a german shepherd or rottweiler that does tricks – plus 2

Bring in your pekingese that does tricks – minus 1

Have your Mom attend class and acknowledge your presence – minus 5

There is a more comprehensive list published somewhere, but you get the idea.

So this kid's mom showed up just before recess, and we all got to hold a kitten as long as we promised not to drop them.  The kittens made noises and wiggled and chased bits of ribbon around the floor, and all the girls wanted to hold one of those cute little wigglers and then they held them up to their faces and remarked how soft they were and how “just so adorable” they were. How weird is that? Forth graders using the word “adorable?” Puke.

A couple of the girls squealed at how cute the kittens were and another girl cried. She actually teared up because the kittens were so cute. Her social status went up a plus 2 for that little tear-fest but I hated her anyway because she made fun of me for getting C's and D's on my spelling tests all year long and she always got A's and B's. I hated her so much. We all hated her and her stupid spelling A's and B's. I don't know what happened to her but I hope she lives in a mobile home in Florida. They have hurricanes in Florida.

The boys wanted to hold the kittens too but we were too boyish to admit we liked furry faced kittens, so we just sort of stumbled around and punched each other on the shoulder and waited until the girl kitten-rush was over, then we just randomly grabbed at an available cat. I finally got one but the kitten I got to hold didn't seem to behave like the other kittens. My kitten didn't seem like the others at all. My kitten was like Gumby. My kitten just sat there in the my arms, barely moving,  just staring cross-eyed at the crying girl.  Maybe she was holding him earlier and dropped him.  I didn't want to get in trouble for breaking a kitten so I did the rational thing and walked him over to the traveling kitten box with the worn out mom cat and chucked him back in.  Maybe he just had a kitten sinus condition and got better later that day.  I wish I knew how that shabby kitten turned out, but I don't.  

I have nightmares now about lots of things: Monsters. Sharks. Under-cooked poultry. Cross-eyed kittens.  I have a long list of fears that wake me up at night.  The burdens that we bear are ours for as long as we choose. We elect to carry those things too valuable to cast away: past failures and faults, disappointments and inadequacies, regrets of things done or left undone. We carry these treasures for as long as we are able, until the burden becomes too great to carry, until we set it aside and just let it go. Such is life.

You can't train for Ironman if you pack a lot of baggage around.  It's too hard.  There are too many hills to climb and pains to soothe.  You have to do it for reasons you can live with and those reasons will be your own.  You have to put in the effort without regretting the time lost.  A couple years ago, I was bemoaning my aches and pains to a co-worker while training for IM CDA.  He listened for a bit and then he said that I didn't sound like I was enjoying it.  He was right.  You have to get your mind right if you are going to do this.  Wrapping your head around the aches is part of it.

I swam today with my swim group and I got tired and wanted to quit before the set was over but peer pressure kept me going.   I wish I could say I kept going because I knew working hard when I am tired would make me a better swimmer, but that wasn't it.  Fear kept me going.  Some social compliance thing.  I didn't want to be the only kid in the class holding a cross-eyed cat.

I admit that rationalization is inadequate.  It was fine today but wait until the dog days, when I have no time to spare, when all I can do is sleep, go to work, train, sleep.  What then?  

I have 23 weeks and some odd number of days left until Whistler and I can't honestly say why I am doing it. I like the idea of Ironman. I like training for Ironman. I like the t-shirts. I like the workouts and I like putting my fat pants in the closet. But so what? Who cares? There has to be more.

Movie: Bite the Bullet.  It is one of the best westerns ever made without John Wayne.

My favorite scene is when the character "Mister", played by Ben Johnson, is telling "Sam", played by Gene Hackman, the reason why he wants to win the horse race. Mister is dying, just minutes away from death, sitting by a camp fire, when he explains that he has held every job possible, from cowboy to miner to barman, but he never made a decent living and, because of it, he wasn't important enough for anybody to know his name. He feared that he would die unmourned and unremarked. Then he died and his fear was realized, so Sam said “I didn't even know your name, Mister.” Maybe you had to see it, but it was a great movie moment. Mister wanted to make the world stand up and take note of his life, and his death. Through victory, Mister thought some unrelated, unattainable goal could be realized. He was wrong.  I don't know that it is my top movie choice of all time, but it is definitely top five.  Definitely. 

I used to have similar dreams and visions, thinking that, through competition, I could repair my past failures, resolve those things unresolved, maybe even validate my life. I think Ironman means something different for all of us. What thing do any of us hope to gain? A three cent ribbon? A t-shirt? Winning? Victory?  Do I hope to see my name in a newspaper or on the Ironman website? Will some stranger stop me on the street and ask for my autograph? Will Cannondale offer me a sponsorship? Do they give out sponsorships in the seniors division? They give out senior division sponsorship for golfers, so maybe, maybe they have me spotted as the next spoksemodel, ala Arnold Palmer.  Now that I think of it, I gotta brush up on my interview technique.

As odd as it sounds, unless you are a pro or trying to be a pro, you aren't competing against anybody else. Your only competition is yourself. There isn't really a 'win' in the age groups. If you come in first in your group, that's great and good for you, but I think your complementary t-shirt looks a lot like my complementary t-shirt. Definitely.  Of course, I won't be going to Kona.  Definitely.

  

The Brown Thing

One of my all-time fav movies is Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase. Everybody has seen it so I won't post a recap of the thing, but just know it was a good movie. The scene with the squirrel and the dog running through the house, knocking stuff over and scaring the bejeebers out of the Christmas dinner guests was a crazy-funny thing to watch.

Everybody thinks that particular scene couldn't happen in real life, but it happened to me. It really did.

It was about ten years ago and I sort of stumbled into it. My marriage bed co-habitant owned two cats at the time that I hated, and somewhat coincidentally, they hated me back. We never got along, but we made a silent pact of mutually assured destruction, sort of like the US and the Russians did in the cold war. I didn't drown them and they treated me like an old, uncomfortable chair that nobody sits in. They ignored me.

Preamble -Night One

So one night, I went to go get into bed at maybe ten or whatever time it was. I pulled the covers back, slid into my spot, reached back and adjusted my two pillows a little better to fit my sensitive melon, then I noticed the cats. They were watching me. They didn't move a muscle, they just sat by the bed and stared. They didn't blink, they just looked at me with their evil cat-eyes, not flinching, just waiting for something to happen. I thought they were waiting for me to die. I grabbed one of the little pillows that has no purpose but lives on my bed and I threw it at the cats. I missed. Stupid cats, I promised myself that tomorrow, as soon as I woke up, they would die in pain and agony, but for next eight hours I would ignore their cat-shenanigans. 

I tried to go to sleep. I was tired. I wanted to go to sleep, but those cats were merciless. The cat-loving spouse said she thought the cats were smarter than I was and maybe they brought a bird in, so we looked under the bed. We looked behind the bed. We looked in the closet. We looked everywhere. For two hours we looked. Sometimes the cats followed us, sometimes they left the room, but they were always back in a few seconds. Waiting. Watching. Judging. Something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what, so I get into bed, pick up the top pillow and try to adjust it when something brown and fast explodes from between my top pillow and my bottom pillow, bounces once off my shoulder and launched into the closet, one claw width in front of the murderous, vile cats. My wife screams for help. The cats scream for blood. The dog tucks tail and runs into the kitchen, whining like the chicken-dog he is. The only thing that calms that dog down is when he digs through the garbage can for scraps, so he does that. It's 1.00AM and with all the noise and swearing, it woke my son so he shows up sporting his tidy-whities and a baseball bat, ready to defend the family.

We spend the next hour in the closet, digging through shoes and shirts and clothes, looking for the brown-thing. Nothing. It was too late and I was too tired to find the brown-thing, so we sent the boy back to bed with his bat and the wife and I slept in the spare bedroom while the cats sat in my closet, staring at my shirts on hangers.

The next day, we went our separate ways. The boy went to school, the wife and I went to work, the cats took up guard duty and watched my shirts in the closet. The dog was made of sterner stuff, so he kept up his garbage can patrol against the brown-thing, comforted with the knowledge that dinner scraps were only twelve hours away.

The War- Night Two

The next night, after the family was home from work and school, we approached the closet much like Wyatt Earp and his family must have approached the OK corral. The winner and the loser were as yet undecided, but one way or another, the battle would come to a close. No quarter was given, nor was it requested. The smell of death was in the air.

The cats took up sentry duty, ready to slash any combatant trying to flee the battleground. The dog stayed in the kitchen with the garbage can, protecting it from the brown-thing. I settled on a seven iron after the driver proved too long to swing. My son brought his baseball bat and a lid to the new frypan. My wife was unarmed.

We slid one shirt at a time on the clothes hanger-pole, looking between the shirts for the intruder. We found it in seconds. It sat there, unmoving. It had disproportionately large eyeballs and flaps of skin between the front and back legs. It stared at me, bravely waiting for my coup-de-grace, my killing stroke. I couldn't do it. The mess would be catastrophic, besides, it was afraid. It might have been shivering.  It just stared at me with those bug-eyes.  I couldn't kill it.  My son proved his worth by slapping the frypan lid down over the brown-thing that looked vaguely like Rocky, the Flying Squirrel. The cats started to jump up and claw my shirts. I sent the wife for a cookie sheet, which we slid under the fry-pan lid, thereby imprisoning the dangerous, toothy beast. We walked out onto the deck, me holding the cookie sheet, the boy holding firm the fry-pan lid. On the count of three, the boy unlidded the brown-thing and I flicked the cookie sheet up, dislodging the prisoner. It spread it's legs like a working girl and gracefully glided down to the lawn, then ran behind the bush.

Prologue

I don't know what became of the brown-thing, I never saw it again. I hope it ran home safely and lived a full life, with a family of his own, in a safe place, with plenty of nuts to eat and without evil cats chasing it. I hope.

I rode fifty four miles today. I got dropped twice in the first thirty minutes, and once in the last thirty. That is a thing I live with these days. Tomorrow I run.