whine

Sunday night is so Monday morning, never more so than when the Monday promises to lead off the first five-day work week in three. I'd say I'd barely remember what I need to do, but that's not true: I'm just trying to forget. Crunch time is here: paperwork deadlines and meetings, curricula to cover, big state tests, final exams. Between my shoulders I feel the tension that pulls between the three weeks remaining being too short and five days being eternity. Alas, the forecast says fifty degrees: too warm for snow.

P-T

I always work it in.

These four words are part of any initial exchange I have at my daughter's school: "I'm a teacher, too." As in, "So I know what you mean," as in, "I can relate," as in, "Don't try to pull one over on me." Except for the many for which I make an exception, I'm not a great respecter of teachers, at least without proof. Mostly it's the off-putting attitude that seems bundled with their certificates, that vague, "You're not, but I am." So my claim is some reverse psychology playing field leveler; it's likely all in my head, but I don't care. It can't hurt.

Tonight, meaningless mission accomplished, I immediately turned parent as I listened to the trio who spend near as much time with the girl as I. I smiled as I digested the praises that were sung by the Comm Arts teacher who really does seem to appreciate her. And then I laughed-- though not in disagreement-- at the former cheerleader who proclaimed the girl, "an eccentric young woman" (quirky had already been taken). "What a nice way to put it," I said, meaning, "is that the best you can do?" as I pictured what opinion I'd be putting a front on if I trotted that phrase out to a parent. It's an experience, being on the other side.

As I left I was satisfied that these strangers know my child well enough and will do all right by her; in my mind, it's mostly up to her. Of course, a glowing academic report makes it easier to assume that they'll do no harm and might help her. Flattery works even on skeptical me.

nothing

It's a fine line down the slippery slope that separates doing from did or intended or used to back in the day. Out of the habit, I am struggling mightily to write here. The back side is littered with fragments of thoughts, incomplete drafts, the detritus of can't-quite-make-it-work. I try and fail, try and fail, try and fail. And yet, I have not quit, though you'll have to take my word, being nothing here to prove otherwise. I suppose this is strategery 432, writing about not being able to write in the hopes that it leads to writing. Not yet, anyway.

Happy Birthday, Stan the Man

Happy 89th birthday to a St. Louis treasure

by Bernie Miklasz

Eighty-nine years ago today, Stanislaw Francizek Musial was born in Donora, a small mining town in western Pennsylvania. His father Lukasz, a Polish immigrant, almost immediately began to call the boy "Stashu."

Later, after the young Musial had grown up to become one of the greatest baseball hitters who ever lived, he'd be known by another nickname in every ballpark in America: "The Man."

When he retired in 1963, Musial owned 17 major-league records, 29 National League records, nine All-Star Game records. If you grew up in St. Louis, by now you know the math, which is so familiar that it must have been taught in the public and private schools: seven-time batting champion, a three-time MVP, and a 24-time All-Star, .331 batting average, 3,630 hits, 475 homers.

In St. Louis, Musuial is an icon and a treasure and our most beloved citizen. And given all of the impromptu harmonica concerts he's given through the decades, Musial probably ranks second on the list (to Chuck Berry) of our most famous musicians.

Musial represents a sweeter time in America and a softer, gentler side of our sporting culture. He never turned down an autograph and was always a gentleman to his fans. He didn't draw his hitting prowess from a syringe. Baseball wasn't a job; it was a reason to smile.

The Man isn't as nimble as he used to be, and he's cut down on travel. Every now and then a rumor goes around that Musial is enduring a serious illness, and is in trouble. But it turns out to be a false alarm, and Stan bounces back again, just as he did in 1962, when he batted .330 after a lot of folks thought he was done.

Musial is doing amazingly well. He still goes to the office of Stan the Man Inc. every weekday to be with his friend and business manager, Dick Zitzmann. Musial stays for an hour or two, signing autographs and opening mail that's arrived from around the world. And then Zitzmann and Musial usually head to lunch.

Three or four times a week, Stan and Lil — his extraordinary bride of 69 years — go out to dinner. Sure, The Man has his share of bad days, but he's rarely scratched from the lineup. The brightness of his eyes hasn't dimmed, and the laughter hasn't stopped.

"I'm often asked what keeps Stan going," Zitzmann said. "The answer is, 'People.' He just enjoys being around people. He lights up. Stan loves his fans as much as they love him."

So today Stan and Lil will celebrate his 89th birthday with family members and close friends. There will be terrific food, and a beautiful birthday cake, and lots of memories.

And Musial, as always, will be surrounded by love.

Which means it will be a perfect birthday.

Has any athlete — ever — felt as much love, and given as much love, as Stan Musial? There will never be another like him.

Every new day with Stan Musial is a blessing. Happy birthday, Stan

Taking the progress out of health care reform

It's been a long time since I posted here. Guess I haven't I haven't had much to say. Then I saw this.

multi

Today's one of those days when I look up from correcting the Portuguese spelling (not that I know uma palavra of Portuguese) in a letter home to a family who doesn't realize that the location of their new apartment will require the deeply SPED son to change schools while talking to a graduate who has stopped by discuss his moral turpitude immigration problem and college applications while putting together a Spring schedule for the Vietnamese newcomer who is terrified of change while supervising make-up work for the kid who is suddenly failing my Civics class while explaining the Industrial Revolution and nativism and the need to keep trying to a girl whose history teacher has just told her she's not worth her time and she might as well quit while trying to get ready for my next class while loaning lunch money while making a note to check with the clinic about the ringworm and the pinkeye and the teenage miscarriage while my lunch grows cold and it occurs to me: there must be an easier way.

10 years in 7 minutes

I'd embed this if I could.

Tuesday

I seem locked in a mortal battle with Tuesday. Though I always win in the end, knock wood and good genes, the work week's second round always seems on the verge of outlasting me, smug when I check the calendar or clock and react with a half-defeated, half-agitated, "Still!?!" So to remind myself that life is for living and that it all counts, whether it's the weekend or some red-letter day or not, three small victories from the annals of Tuesday, November 10:

• Finding the words to help my daughter find her way from sobbing mess to a smiling, "I feel a lot more confident now."
• Making it to the Y at 8:45 p.m. Making excuses takes far more energy.
• Refusing to accept, "I don't get it. I can't," and creating the space, at least for ten minutes, for the kid to focus and listen and learn.
  

Six months from now I'll likely be unable to pick out this 24-hour period out of a line-up of fall semester school days. From even that distance, Tuesday was Tuesday was Tuesday, indistinguishable except that they aren't. Each matters, and if one doesn't, well, that's on me. Life is for living, seven days a week, not enduring or wishing away.

a glimmer

The calvary has arrived in the form of a girl born during my first quarter of college. Impossibly, this means she is a fully degreed grad student nearly as old as the newlywed me, and not, say, a sixth grader who wandered down the wrong hall. She is yet another English major taken hold by the late realization that after all she wants to teach; it is the circle of work life complete in its best interview clothes.

Given that hers must be the most temporary and ill-paying of part-time jobs in a school, she is wondrously qualified-- meaning, she wants it. She is motivated in that twenty-two year-old way, full of fragile confidence. So my job-- assisted is far more labor intensive than do-it-myself-- is to help her help me. Then, theoretically, we both win. It might, I daresay, work.

At the end of day 1.5 I felt nearly accomplished. Kids got taught, lessons got planned, papers got graded and entered, paperwork got dispatched instead of shuffled and piled. Kids were engaged just a little bit more. I suppose that, minimally, that is my job description; these activities are not unusual. But for the first time in a while I left without any mental accounting of who got gypped or ignored or put off. We may have actually done all we needed to do.

What's different? It doesn't hurt to have a witness, but it's more a chance to breathe and focus, to dump the I-don't-have-time-for-this and do my job-- every other day until December.

make up work

In my defense, everything happened in October. Football and football, Bruce Springsteen again, the marathon, the marathon, the marathon. But four posts! Four! Good grief. When so much happened! It shouldn't be excuse; it should be fodder. Perhaps I'll get around to the rest of the running stories, the tales of the girl, the students. I have a list, actual pen-to-paper, of things I don't want to forget. Perhaps I should commence typing.

return

It is all habit.

Witness, both of you, the precipitous drop in the number of posts here, from daily to now and then sporadic, as my time and my energy and my random thoughts have been redirected elsewhere. To slip out of the rhythm was hardly my intention-- the neglect here nags-- but it happened, not unlike (or totally different) from my verge-of-flagging running routine.

After the marathon-- have I mentioned I ran one?-- I had a near week of officially sanctioned not to mention physically mandated rest. I walked, first stiff then sore, maybe twice in seven days before I ever tried to run. But eventually I got in what felt like mile 27 and then one or two more and then I was busy, I was tired, I was lazy. It rained. This was not a long stretch-- I'm only 16 days removed--but after 30 mile weeks it felt like ditching, or at least strolling the edge. Life just might have gone on. The Y track is too small, my calves are too sore, the December race is a mere 5K-- how could it matter? A forty-five minute drive home from work is more than enough time to devolve from "let's go" to "let's not"; a stretch on the couch is easy to justify.

But today I did not sit down despite just beyond brisk weather; I shushed my internal monologue and went. I just did it, as they say. Once out and back in, slow, but somehow stronger, it felt that the switch had been flipped. It feels better to have gone than to have not; it feels good to be breathless and sweaty. This time, I think I'll remember that. And if I don't, maybe I'll come here and read it.

the start

They call it The Moment: the point in marathon when the runner knows she will finish. For me, this time, this first time, I think I'd call it The Start. I'd sat on the curb for nearly ninety pre-dawn minutes as Geary Street filled in around me with dozens then hundreds then thousands of runners. I stretched, and I watched, and I waited, as calm as I now feel in the comfort of my living room couch. I record this atypical absence of butterflies now both to remember and to verify that it was real.

The sounds in my memory are muffled; sharper is the edge of the cold breeze that blew up from the bay and the coarse cotton feel of my off-white throw-away gloves. The wind may have calmed as we shuffled then walked around Powell to Post to the gate to the next 26.2. I couldn't tell you. I know the black Goodwill fleece that I was coached to buy then discard heated through quickly and I left it a mile out with the gloves.

I boggled, slightly, at those who pulled off to the sidewalk to pose with the sunrise over the not-golden-but-grey Bay Bridge. They may well have passed me minutes or hours later, but race as photo op does not fit into the uninterrupted progress that is, to my mind by definition, marathon. Forward through the city streets, up the hills, up the hills, up the hills. Around the curve of the water, through the misty forest, down the glorious decent by the cliffs. Eyes lingering, mind memorizing, or trying, feet moving, always moving.

I'm not sure I remember everything I saw or could have seen according to the route and the map and the pictures, but I remember how I felt for every minute of that race. I was ready. And then, I did it.

portrait

She is quiet in what seems a particularly Asian way, hands folded and passive: a stereotype in a seat. Though she's making friends with those girls who can relate to her word-by-word journey, her voice is barely known to her other teachers. She comes and goes, sits and works, sits and thinks. And while, with the aid of the electronic translator we do confirm that even at home she is known as shy, she nods with the slightest of smiles when I say, "You're not shy with me."

I'm thinking, and so is she, of the times when the times interest and vocabulary fizz together and spill out in a gush of excitable pretty-much-English. Then she's herself, a sixteen year-old girl, and not a student not trapped by I-don't-know-how-to-say. She tells me of a squirrel she kept as a pet, of her plans for university, of a relative's unfortunate brush with the casino, of any topic we can muster. For weeks in this way I've been assembling a mosaic portrait, but today, through one exclamation in a little makeshift poem it felt as if I got a glimpse of the real person she is:

My name is Tiên.
My name
is important to me.
I am not Tina!
My name
is from Vietnam.
My friends know my name.

me

As far as they know, I'm a runner.

Let slip or exclaim you're doing a marathon soon, and no matter how you couch it-- I am a beginner; I am slow; sometimes I walk-- that tends to be the impression. And while I give myself credit for the grammatical progression from, "I run" to, "I am a runner," applying the label is still a novelty, a shade of identity still complete with the tags.

Forty years later-- perhaps coincidence, perhaps not-- I'm doing something new, something that most of my circle rightly greeted with, "What?!" They're with me now, alternately bemused and impressed as they look through the lens of Before. No one, of course, will support me or appreciate the accomplishment more than those who saw it unfold, but there are other useful perspectives out in the world. A stranger's acceptance of my self-description, while far less substantial, is a different kind of confirmation, a little lesson in reinvention. It's not permission, but perhaps it's a signal.

In a sense--a debatable sense, but one that means something to me--I am who I say I am. When those who have no reason to believe but also no reason to doubt take me at my word, I find it oddly encouraging. It's a reminder, not that I'm pulling it off, but that by doing it, I become who I am.

taper madness

I would totally feel better if I went out and ran around the block. I know this with absolute certainty. Nevermind that it's after eleven p.m., pitch black and cold, and that my street doesn't have streetlights not to mention blocks. Not to mention the fact that the ten godawful slow miles today already aggravated my knee, and I'd get barely anywhere before limping home feeling worse than when I started. That is entirely irrelevant. I need endorphins, stat. Or whatever biological compound that would quell these quite literal jitters. Perhaps I'll start smoking just so I can quit; that jones might outweigh this one. Maybe. Or at least distract me from the loop of based-oh-so-slightly-on-reality thoughts that are racing through what's left of my mind. Five months of training will pay off-or not--two weeks from today if the meantime doesn't kill me.

If I don't get sick. I think my throat hurts. What if everyone in school gets the flu? If I'm not more injured than I already know. If the physical therapy doesn't make it worse. Maybe the x-ray didn't show the real problem. If it's not too humid or not too hot or not too cold or if whatever fitness I've built doesn't drain completely away as I sit here and rest. I know it won't. How could it not?! They say it won't; I think they're lying. Not getting 20 in must invalidate everything; I bet you think so, too. If I don't gain weight or if my shoes aren't wrong or if halfway through I don't lose a contact lens. What if I get a migraine? If I don't eat the wrong thing. If there aren't lines for the johns. If I'm not too slow. What if I have to walk and they turn me around? What if those walkers get in my way? What if I just can't do it? With everyone watching!

I know that I can. I have come this far, and getting it done is the only option. I'll be fine. My knee will be better, and if it's not, I'll still do it. I know. I do. I believe. Or at least I would if I could go run 'round the block.

good help

Ambushed again by my own tears, I must admit to myself the obvious: I am a crier. From poised to can't-speak-fighting-back I go in an instant, equal parts surprised and self-conscious. I am always, always unaware and oblivious until I hear the catch in my voice. Then I'm done for, my internal scales finally measuring the last straw right as they are tipped to the teary.

I'm not sure, entirely, that this propensity is a flaw, but damn if it doesn't derail a good riot act. Hard to continue a rant when one can't choke out the words. Not that I had raised my voice to the not-quite-competent receptionist for whom I suspect I'm now a dinner-time story. But I did perhaps relentlessly endeavor to point out the error in canceling the first of my three back-to-back appointments without telling me and then chiding me for being early. It's an appointment book; I get it. It's not catastrophe. Except when the outcome of a nearly six-month goal seems to be riding on information now unknown for yet another of my few remaining days. Then, for a moment, it feels as if it is.

Welcome to life in a medical office, Miss I'm-new-here-and-I-didn't-think. Next time, I beg you, call!

Protect Insurance Companies

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

high tech

"What?" says the girl, eyes full of at-me or with-me as she seeks the source of my chuckle. She looks at the monitors, she looks at the screen, she looks, again, at me. As if there's nothing just a little bit funny about the two of us propped in my bed side-by-side, each with a lap-full of keyboard, sharing the wireless and vaguely inappropriate TV. I "nothing" her question away, and we click and we giggle--one of us wondering if she should be cringing--until she nudges me to check another tab. She's e-mailing me, from six inches away. What an excellent use of technology.

I do not take this opportunity for any questions, for any capital-C-Conversations or capital-P parenting, though I do sneak a sideways glance at her inbox. Instead I just match her animated emoticons pixel for pixel in a nonsense string of replies and make a note to remember.

with a smile and a wave

At first he was the kicker, the punchline to my stats. Every time I rattled off my inflated roster of old timers plus freshmen plus transfers, I'd segue from the total to the tally of special needs and conclude with a flourish: "Plus the mute kid!" As in, "What am I supposed to do about that?!"

Not much, it turns out.

This morning he turned up with his aunt and heretofore unknown brother and checked out for San Diego, where he'll live with his mom. Five signatures later, his problems are no longer mine; my day is that much less complicated. I'm disappointed, frankly. Oh, I do feel the relief of one less prep to my day, but mostly, I'm sad to see him go, sad for progress interrupted.

Not that I am the answer, not that I knew what to do, really, but it felt like we were figuring it out. After a few false starts, I had found English work that seemed to be on his level; I learned that in Civics, he liked the maps. I slapped my forehead when he sneaked into Scrabble and spelled out, "hola" to a girl. I talked to him as any other kid. Maybe that's all it was. But he was listening, lately, doing what I asked, learning, maybe, or at least learning to trust me. Or perhaps he was just counting the days. His is one story I don't ever expect to hear; I only hope that someday, he tells it.

the goal

Leaned back, feet flip-flopped apart, too big for his chair, elbow propped on the desk behind, he looks ready for something, something not school: I badger him into position, back into my boundaries. It's a habit, though questionably productive.

A month into school-- already a month-- and we're still figuring each other out. I do, however, know his secret, not that it would take a super sleuth. When a kid snatches his notebook up to his chest and then "reads" a story far more elaborate than could be contained in few penciled phrases, well. I am a professional. And he is a talker, an aspiring charmer, all quick-moving defense and constant, one-step ahead strategy. It would seem less effort to learn how to write. And read, maybe, though I'm not yet sure how much is can't and how much is doesn't. His scores are fine and his homework's complete and his friends, I'm sure, are willing.

Sometime soon we need to talk outside of my grand central classroom so I can introduce our goal for the year: enough progress that he can be as proud of himself on paper as he is on the ballfield. If I were his coach, it might be easier to prove myself to not be the opposition, but, if he ever stops giggling at the notion of a girl who loves football-- I'll take whatever in--perhaps we'll gain some ground.