Give your heart a little rest in 2023

What sense can any of us make of life’s crazy twists and turns?

In the winter of 1977, I was very, very surprisingly, accepted by a prestigious college. In the summer of 1977, I was very, very unsurprisingly unaccepted by that college. Very, very angry, I tore up the rejection letter, threw it behind the back seat of my VW Bug, and, without telling my parents what happened, resolved to continue working in Houston and forego college.

As fall approached, my parents often asked if I’d heard what date classes would start, but I’d quickly change the subject. This worked until one early September day when my red-faced mom came crashing into my room waving the rejection letter she’d carefully taped back together.

“What’s this?” she screamed as my stunned father walked in the room behind her.

“Oh, yeah,” I stammered backing away from a charging mom, “I forgot to tell you I’m not going to college.”

“Oh, yes you are!” my mother – who bitterly regretted her own foreshortened college career – declared as she spun on her heels and gestured for dad to follow.

Dad was a traveling salesman who enjoyed visiting college libraries on his trips around Texas. The week before, he’d visited a tiny school, the University of Dallas in Irving (I know, I know), and thought they just might be desperate enough to accept a nonapplicant the day before classes started.

The next morning, with only the shirts on our backs, dad and I flew to Dallas. The plan was that, if by some miracle they accepted me, I’d return to Houston, quit my job, pack my things, and fly back to Dallas to start school.

At first, the admissions officer laughed at our loony proposal, but my supersalesman father persisted until she reluctantly agreed. She did, however, insist that I not return to Houston because I needed to start classes the next day. So, my father drove me to a nearby store to buy underwear, socks, and a toothbrush.

Back at UD, my father shook my hand and wished me luck. I got out of the car and stood there alone in the gathering dusk holding two shopping bags. As he rushed to the airport, I shouted after him, “What’s the name of this school again?” But he drove on. Forlorn, I turned to walk into my dorm with my head hung low absolutely convinced that no good could ever come from this screwy deal.

Naturally, my four years at UD were among the best of my life. I, also, met and married my beautiful wife of forty years while a student there.

I remembered all this recently as I gazed upon my perfect nine-month-old grandson. I also recalled a million other unplanned, unforeseen, and unwanted events in the lives of his parents and grandparents that miraculously stitched together the circumstances that resulted in the birth of this baby without whose luminous presence the universe would be infinitely diminished.

I always think I know exactly what my family and I need, and I get angry when things don’t go my way. But what if St. Theresa was right when she said, “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones”?

Maybe this new year instead of getting angry when we don’t get what we want, we should look at the people we love and their incalculable worth and appreciate the fact that there’s a plan far beyond our reckoning that somehow resulted in the miracles of their existence. And, after acknowledging the undeniable miracles that plan has wrought, perhaps we should consider a peaceful surrendering of ourselves to its wisdom going forward?

Because the events of our lives often seem so random – and sometimes even cruel – in real time, trusting that plan is about the most difficult thing you can do. Frankly, it’s something I’ve only been able to do in the last few years and sporadically at best. But after fifty years of searching, it’s the only way I’ve found to achieve true peace in this fallen world.

Have a Happy New Year.

Family Life Is Not For The Fainthearted

Holiday TV commercials are filled with images of happy families reveling in scenes of peaceful contentment: joyfully opening perfectly wrapped presents under perfectly decorated trees; rushing out in fresh snowfalls to beam at new, non-snow covered, perfect cars; et cetera ad nauseam. The holidays joyously serve as the yearly crescendo to their perfectly peaceful family lives.

All this peacefulness seems odd to those of us who are members of actual families. That’s because we know family life is far from a peaceful idyll. In fact, having a family is life’s wildest ride. If you’re looking for hair-raising adventure, forget lion hunting in Africa or running with the bulls in Pamplona and try paying off a thirty-year mortgage with one hand while raising kids with the other.

Soon after your first baby arrives, you realize you’ve permanently strapped yourself to a runaway rollercoaster. It quickly becomes clear that you’ve lost all control because your focus has permanently shifted from your own life to your child’s, over which you have frighteningly little control. So, your goal becomes to keep driving forward despite being unable to steer, which often lands you in a ditch. Here’s one vivid example from a personal catalogue of hundreds.

Due to the higher IQs of all the other parents, I became a Cub Scout Den Leader in 1999. I scrupulously avoided any further leadership positions for the rest of my life.

After having to be airlifted from our first meeting, I realized these seven, ten-year-old boys were far too rambunctious for any ordinary meeting format. So, I decided to bust out of our meeting room and take them to an Astros-Cubs game at the Astrodome.

It was the year after the great home run derby between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, and Sammy was on another homer hot streak. My plan was to have the kids witness baseball history and, also, catch the attention of national TV cameras by having us wear eight, single letter t-shirts which together spelled out, VIVA SOSA. I borrowed a new Suburban from one of the parents and headed for Houston from Corpus Christi with all seven kids onboard.

I knew that cooping the boys up in one vehicle for the seven-hour roundtrip was sheer madness, so I’d picked the Suburban mainly because it had a video player. I’d carefully selected several movies guaranteed to hold the attention of ten-year-old boys, leaning heavily on the Star Wars trilogy.

Thanks to George Lucas, the drive to Houston was largely uneventful. However, on the long walk from the parking lot to our cheap seats, I looked like a man trying to herd soap bubbles in a high wind.

The game itself was completely lost on the boys who spent the whole-time eating cotton candy and wrestling with each other over preferred seats. And, despite my frantic efforts, the closest we got to spelling out our tribute was VISA VOSA.

After the game, I somehow managed to herd them through the sellout crowd back to the car. Jerry had proven to be the rowdiest boy, so I put him in the passenger seat next to me for the long drive home. As we passed two teenage girls in the parking lot, Jerry suddenly rolled down his window and yelled at them, “I like girls that wear Abercrombie & Fitch.”

The girls were shocked that a ten-year-old boy wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a large “V” had yelled at them. I was shocked that a ten-year-old boy wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a large “V” had already developed a fashion sense.

“It’s from a song,” Jerry explained as I rolled up his window.

We stopped for fast food on the way home, and – nightmare of nightmares – the video player broke. The last thing I remember was Jerry yelling, “Food fight!” as the air filled with ketchup covered french fries.

It’s undeniably true that raising kids is the most exasperating, excruciating, and exhausting thing you can do. So, someone please explain to me why, while taking my oldest child to her freshman orientation at a faraway college, I suddenly started crying uncontrollably while speeding along the freeway in a driving rainstorm. Trying to hide my emotional collapse from my family, I stupidly opened my window so the raindrops would mask my tears. No one, not even my teenage son who was getting drenched in the seat behind me, said a word.

THE DAY I WON THE LOTTERY

Even if your whole life has been nothing but luckless drudgery, the fact is you can never be completely sure what will happen tomorrow. Maybe the cards will finally turn in your favor. One crazy day, they turned in mine – a little bit.
For years, I’d always driven to the same convenience store at lunchtime to get a printout of the winning lottery numbers to check against my losing numbers. There was a ritualistic sameness to it as I’d sit in my car sucking on a 32 ounce drink, checking the numbers, tearing up my losing ticket, and cursing myself for being stupid enough to keep playing this sucker’s game.
But on this day, I quickly saw I had picked three of the numbers. I opened the car door to go get my $3, but fell back into the seat when I saw I had four numbers. I thought I had somehow gotten hold of two winning number printouts, but no, it was actually my ticket. And then I suddenly realized I had five of the numbers.
My shocky, fevered brain then determined that I had picked all six numbers.
The tattered remnants of my soul shot out of my body and flew over the Circle K. I was free in a way I hadn’t been since I was a barefoot five year old running around my backyard.
But then stern reality reimposed itself, and I realized that I had misread the sixth number. There was an immediate physical sensation of crashing back to earth. After a minute or so, I looked at the printout and saw that I had won $1063 for picking five numbers. It was a long, long way from the 20-something million that would have almost gotten me completely out of debt, depending on whether my wife had gone shopping that afternoon.
I went back to work and tried to play it cool, but the ticket was burning a hole in my pocket. Was this little scrap of paper really worth $1063? I told my boss what happened, and he gave me the rest of the afternoon off. I made a beeline for the lottery office on Corona.
I walked in the door, and the lady behind the counter looked at me and said, “Let me guess, five out of six numbers, right?”
“How did you know?”
“Because every other winner who walks in here is happy, happy, happy. The only ones who look like their dog just died are the five-out-of-sixers.”
I cashed the check and went to pick up my kids early from after-school daycare. You have to understand that the father of a 6 and a 9 year old spends most of his time explaining to them why he can’t afford to buy them the thousands of things they’re always wanting. So when they came running up to me, and I shouted, “Tell me what you want me to buy for you,” they both skidded to a stop and stared at me as if I’d been body snatched.
That night I was careful to tell my wife “$1063, that’s how much I won in the lottery,” in that order, because I didn’t want her to go through anything like my ordeal in the car.
Some hijinks ensued the next day after my kids told everyone at school that their dad had won the lottery, but we weathered it.
Overall, my advice is to play the billion dollar lottery. But, have somebody else check your numbers.

HOW TO SURVIVE A BAD BABY, VOLUME II

Sooner or later, it occurs to every dad that this whole having a baby thing might not have been the greatest idea. That thought occurred to me pretty much every day because my son Matt was the worst baby who ever lived.

His specialty was waiting for my more vulnerable moments and then striking suddenly like a submerged crocodile ambushing a wading wildebeest. For instance, in restaurants he’d always wait until the food was actually served before making his move. Until then, other customers would gurgle over my cute, smiling, seemingly innocent baby. But I knew the truth: he was waiting for the trap to be baited.

As soon as the waiter would set the plate in front of me, Matt’s eyes would lock on mine. I’d pick up the fork, and he’d just stare. It wasn’t until the first forkful was an inch from my mouth that he’d let fly with one of his screaming, Tasmanian devil tantrums, and I’d have to rush him outside.

One night, we went out to eat at a nice restaurant with some visiting friends. I was starving, so, rather than take howling Matt outside right away, I quickly choked down several mouthfuls of food. It couldn’t have taken two minutes, but already the other customers were glowering at me. And as I reached across the table to pick up Matt, I knocked over a glass of red wine onto the white table cloth, which prompted the smirking guy at the next table to applaud. My friend sprang up and rushed toward him shouting, ”Yeah, you like that? You want me to knock over your wine glass?”

Just another fun-filled, relaxing night out with the family.

On airplanes, he was Mr. Charm until we were wheels up. As for what happened in the air, suffice it to say that when we finally de-planed every passenger took extra time to give us an angry glare, I had a Mount Vesuvius headache, and my wife was usually crying.

But it was on our road trips to visit my parents in Houston that Matt would paint his masterpieces. It was three hours trapped in our tiny car with a blaring air-raid siren in the backseat.

One late night, there was only one empty intersection with one last red light between us and my parents’ house, and I couldn’t take it anymore; I took a gamble and ran that light as big as Dallas.

As I watched the police officer walk slowly toward our car, I was sure Matt would stop crying in order to avoid giving me any advantage in the coming negotiations. But, because we had stopped and we weren’t immediately letting him out, he started crying even louder.

I rolled the window all the way down – to give the officer the full air-raid siren effect – and handed him my license. He grimaced, and then looked up at the sky, swinging his head around as if on the lookout for dive bombing Stukas. Then he shined his flashlight through Matt’s window and stared for several seconds as Matt struggled to rip apart his car seat straps like a hysterical Superman trying to free himself from kryptonite restraints.

“How long has he been like that?” he asked.

“All the way since Corpus,” I told him.

Still staring at Matt, he handed me back my license, told me to drive carefully, turned, and hurried back to his cruiser. Score one for dad.

All grown up now, Matt left home for good a couple of weekends ago. Ever since, the silence has been driving me mad. More than anything, I hate it when the world is round.

Tax Day Blues

Douglas Shulman, IRS Commissioner during President Obama’s first term, admitted in 2010 that he had an accountant prepare his returns because the tax code was just too complicated. So it’s understandable why, like all Americans who are forced to go it alone, I approach my 1040 with all the courage and resolution of the Cowardly Lion shuffling sideways towards the Wizard of Oz.

I learned the tax day ritual by watching my father. Armed with only pencil, paper, and Pall Malls, he’d sit at the dining room table surrounded by thick clouds of blue smoke and piles of cancelled checks and receipts miserably calculating and calculating again as midnight ticked ever closer.

All of us kids would lay low, because that night literally anything would set him off. My mother would sit, very still and forlorn, on the living room couch dreading his next barked order to immediately find a missing receipt or cancelled check. When it came, she’d sigh softly and slowly head back to the big kitchen drawer stuffed with 20 years worth of “important” papers, dead batteries, broken pencils, a hammer, and birthday candles, and sort through it all…again.

There was also a ritual dance and chanting involved. Dad would suddenly slam the palms of his hands against his forehead, shoot to his feet, and pace quickly around the room, all the while repeating, “There’s no justice in the world!” I’ve added banging my head against the computer screen to the routine; somehow, I know he’d approve.

My tax day weapon of choice is TurboTax. It figures the amount you owe by asking a series of strange, seemingly disjointed questions. If you give the answer it wants, it asks another question to determine if you qualify for a particular deduction. If not, you’re out of luck. For example:

Q: Between June 9 and September 3, 2012, did you purchase any beer from a domestic retailer to be used solely for personal consumption?

A: Why, yes I did.

Q: (So far so good.) Between June 9 and September 3, 2012, did you consider purchasing a team of Clydesdales to assist you in transporting your beer?

A: Yes. (Hey, what foamophile hasn’t dreamt of that?)

Q: If you had purchased Clydesdales at any time during 2012, would you have grazed them in Puerto Rico, Micronesia, or American Samoa?

A: (Coin Flip.) No.

Sorry. You do not qualify for the American Protectorates Clydesdale Reduction Deduction.

Me: “There’s no justice in the world!”

Thanks for nothing, TurboTax. And you too, Doug Shulman, O Wise and Wonderful Wizard of the IRS.

Why I Fell For Notre Dame Football Coach, Charlie Weis, In 2005

Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame. Wake up the echoes cheering her name, send the volley cheer on high, shake down the thunder from the sky. What though the odds be great or small old Notre Dame will win over all, while her loyal sons are marching onward to victory—-Notre Dame Fight Song

It wasn’t until I was kneeling in front of the TV pounding my fist on the floor that I figured it out. It was October 15, 2005 and Notre Dame had just lost to USC, the #1 team in the country, thanks to some last second heroics by their Heisman Trophy quarterback. USC had won 27 in a row, so the loss wasn’t really unexpected. But for all 4 quarters I kept thinking that something about this game was different.

I became a Notre Dame fan several years after they won the last of their 11 national championships in 1988. My Notre Dame teams meant well, behaved well, were overly prone to helping opposing players to their feet, and consistently lost every game that actually meant something. They fit in well with my two other obsessions: the Astros and the Oilers (RIP).

But there is something about ND that holds me in its grip far more than the other teams I follow. Maybe, given my 16 years at hard labor in Catholic schools, it’s their name. Maybe it’s the high academic standards and graduation rate of its players. Or maybe it’s just the rubbernecking fascination of watching a yearly train wreck. But whatever it is, my identity with the team and its fortunes is complete.

At each bad break or zany misstep, my anguished, profane cries are so loud that every backyard dog in the vicinity howls right along with me. My football fan neighbors must think it’s a miracle that whenever Notre Dame throws an interception or fumbles the ball, the local mutts mourn.

In 2005 they hired a new coach, Charlie Weis, who had never played college football, never head coached above the high school level, and looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy’s “before” picture. And, incredibly, he really seemed to believe the Irish could be national champions again. I laughed at him along with everyone else.

But then a strange thing happened. The team started playing like they thought they could be champions too. On both sides of the ball, they looked like they actually expected to win. And win they did. Going into the showdown with USC, they were a remarkable 4 – 1, and nobody was laughing at the chunky coach anymore.

Throughout the game, the Irish relentlessly battled on in spite of an overpowering USC running back and their own shattered plans and blasted hopes. If it had been any other school, you’d say they played like a team possessed. They fought the two time national champions to a stalemate, only to lose in the last few seconds of a game for the ages that drove me to my knees.

And that’s when it dawned on me. Something had happened that I’d heard of, but never actually seen before: Coach Weis had awakened the echoes. Echoes of championships, but much more than championships. Echoes of greatness, but far rarer than greatness. They were echoes of glory.

And on that one nearly perfect Indiana afternoon, they were honored.

Just Another Childbirth, No Big Deal

As I watched the most beautiful girl in her class walk across the stage to collect her college diploma, I thought back to the first time I saw her 22 years ago.

Her mother and I had driven to the hospital very early that morning, running red lights (!) the whole way, but the doctor sent us home because she wasn’t far enough along. So we’d spent the rest of the day trudging up and down hills and walking around and around our apartment complex trying to speed things up, but nothing seemed to work. When I told her I’d read about a woman who had climbed stairs carrying two heavy suitcases until things started moving along, she made a face, rolled her eyes, and went to bed.

By then it was 10 at night, and I was hungry. I searched the freezer and found a lobster frozen in a tube of seawater that I’d bought months before as a joke. I dropped it into a pot of boiling water and instantly the entire apartment reeked like Boston Harbor at low tide. That did it. She came into the kitchen, green at the gills, and announced we were immediately going back to the hospital. (More red lights!) We were broke and had no insurance, so the plan was natural child birth: in and out of the hospital in 24 hours.

At first it was kind of fun. They put us in a homey “birthing room”, MTV was on, and the doctors and nurses were laughing and making jokes. Then about 4 in the morning the laughter stopped. The baby’s blood pressure was too high and there was some danger the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. Suddenly the comfy bed turned into a gurney, and I was running beside it careening toward an operating room.

The doctor gave my wife one more chance to push. She tried, but she was too far gone. The half asleep anesthesiologist on call ran in, his bare feet covered by blue doctor’s footies. Trays and other equipment were quickly wheeled in, and several O.R. nurses appeared. The prep for the C-section looked like something being thrown together at the last minute, which is exactly what it was.

A nurse noticed my ashen gray, sweaty face, quickly grabbed my arm, and dragged me back to the birthing room. A low pitched, keening sound I’d never made before or since emerged involuntarily from the back of my throat. “It always looks like that,” she assured me, “but they know what they‘re doing.” She left, and after a few minutes of taking deep breaths and feeling ashamed because I’d left my wife alone, I staggered back to the operating room. I held my wife’s hand and tried to appear calm. There was a ripping sound, a baby’s cry, and the doctor happily shouted, “How about a girl?” Nurses rushed the baby off and I was led back to the birthing room.

After a while, they took me to see my daughter. There she was in a clear plastic basinet with a McDonald’s warming light overhead. The nurse picked her up and handed her to me. I stared into those sky blue eyes, and saw everything all at once: loving, smiling, sleeping, laughing, crying, crawling, walking, falling, rising, running, playing, learning, dreaming, studying, leaving, graduating, working, struggling, marrying, mothering, nurturing, worrying, aging, dying, and loving.

As for me, my beloved, insatiable, all consuming self shattered like a windowpane hit by a Nolan Ryan fastball, and all that remained was the perfect baby girl I held in my arms.

How I Made Saint John Paul II Laugh, Twice

In 1979, I spent a semester at the University of Dallas, Rome campus. A few days after we arrived, five or six of us decided to wander around the city to get our bearings. We wound up in St. Peter’s Square where we saw two parallel lines of barricades running down its center about twenty feet apart. When we asked why, we were told that when John Paul II returned that night from Mexico, he would be driven through the square in an open car. We hustled over to a spot right next to a barricade and began the long vigil.

As we waited, I thumbed through a little book of helpful foreign phrases for English speaking travelers. I sat up straight when I realized that some of them were in Polish. What better way to stand out to a Pole in a crowd of screaming Italians than to yell something in Polish? We carefully studied the book to choose just the right phrase and practiced it together all afternoon.

The huge crowd became electric when the Pope finally arrived. As his car drove slowly by, our little group shouted out in Polish, in unison, “Where are you going with our luggage?” His head snapped around, and for a second his eyes flared with the burning indignation that would eventually smelt the Iron Curtain. But, when he saw it was a group of smiling, dumb – probably American – students desperately trying to attract his attention, he laughed and gave us a blessing .

A couple of months later, we were working our way back to campus from the train station after a 5 day trip through several countries. We were too broke even for youth hostels, but we did have Eurail passes, so we had slept on the trains. We were tired, hungry, and didn’t smell great.

As we walked behind the Vatican, we saw several people obviously waiting for something. They told us the Pope was coming back from a dinner in town, and that this road led to his private drive. Just then, a large car drove up and stopped right in front of us. John Paul II popped out of the sunroof and everyone began taking pictures and wishing him a good night.
I threw my suitcase down, knelt beside it, and began frantically searching for my camera. I couldn’t find it. In desperation, I dumped its contents onto the street, but it was no use; it wasn’t in there. Then I noticed that all the cameras had stopped flashing, and that our little group had fallen into an awkward silence.

I looked up and saw that the Pope was patiently waiting for me to find my camera. As I knelt in the gutter, surrounded by my dirty socks and underwear, I threw my arms out wide and shrugged my shoulders as if to say, “That’s life.” And then the Pope, the Occupant of the Throne of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ threw out his arms wide and shrugged his shoulders as if to agree, “Yeah, that’s life.” He laughed, threw me a quick blessing, got back in the car and was driven away.

I miss him.

The Bad Dad Diaries, Volume I

When the kids were little, I was badly sleep deprived, so I wouldn’t actually “wake up” until a half hour or so after getting out of bed. It was a weird, semi-dream state that left me incapable of communicating beyond grunting, nodding, and hearing every third word. My wife, on the other hand, was immediately wide awake and ready to organize the new day.

Every morning I’d rush – half comatose – out to the car, still fumbling with the buttons on my shirt, racing to get the kids to school on time. My wife would follow behind, herding the kids ahead of her while deftly fixing Erin’s hair or stuffing Matt’s homework into his backpack.

As I’d back the car out of the driveway, she’d hold on to the window frame sidestepping and shouting instructions like a NASCAR crew chief. “Pick them up from daycare at 5:30 and get Matt to soccer practice by 5:45. Erin needs to be at choir by 6, so it’s going to be close, and you know how they are if she’s late. I put an after school snack in their backpacks so don’t buy them any junk food. I’ll make spaghetti when I get home from work.” Watching her recede in the rearview mirror, I often thought I should buy her semaphore flags so she could get off one last signal before I turned the corner.

Amazingly, it usually worked. Except for that time when I got home about 7, and she asked, “Where are the kids?” Thinking it was some kind of fun, new guessing game, I smiled, looked around, and replied,” I don’t know. Where are they?”

“The daycare closed an hour ago,” she growled.

“I thought you…were…supposed…to…,” I quavered. Apparently I‘d missed a signal that morning. But, a quick trip across town to the daycare director’s home and a steep fine later all was well.

Most of the time though, thanks entirely to my wife, our morning routine worked well, and we all arrived wherever we were going on time. The first time she was out of town; however, there were a few snags.

I had no idea what she did every morning, but I figured waking up 10 minutes earlier would give me plenty of time to do whatever it was. After my alarm clock went off, I woke the kids, told them to get dressed for school, and went off to get ready for work. When I came back, I was surprised to find them in the living room sitting on the bottoms of their feet (as only those under 8 can do without requiring emergency dual knee replacement surgery) watching cartoons in their underwear. When I asked them why they weren’t dressed, Erin, without taking her eyes off the screen, said, “Mommy always gives us stuff to wear”

I ran to their rooms and found everything but Matt’s right sneaker. I tossed them their school clothes as I sped past them on my way to the kitchen, where I poured two glasses of orange juice, popped two glazed toaster pastries into the toaster, and hustled back to Matt’s room to find his lost sneaker. I’d looked everywhere and was looking there again when I spied it cowering in the black recesses of the farthest corner under his bed.

I was shimmying like Shakira under the bed and just managed to brush it with my finger when an alarm I’d never heard before went off. I lurched forward, banging my head on the underside of the box spring, and grabbed the shoe just as Matt yelled,

“It’s smoky.”

I again raced past them, their eyes still locked on the TV now blaring the Looney Tunes theme song, to find two bright orange tongues of fire from the toaster licking the underside of the wooden kitchen cabinets like twin flamethrowers. Forgetting whatever they taught me in Cub Scouts about fighting fires, I picked up the glasses and splashed OJ on the toaster. Fourth of July sparks burst from the toaster and the wall socket – but the fire was out. I pulled out the plug – more sparks – picked up the toaster and threw it into the sink.

That very second, my wife called. “Hi. You should have left for school 5 minutes ago.” Bang! I slammed down the phone and ran to the car dragging along two hungry, confused kids, their shirts on inside out.

My Miserable Marathon, Part II

In 1968 I was a 9 year old head-over-heels Jets fan living just outside NYC. One sunny day I was flipping through a sports magazine and saw a picture of Joe Namath with the ring and index fingers of his right hand taped together. So, naturally, I taped my fingers together.

I walked around like that for a few days until my mother asked me, Why? So, I told her about the picture. She asked me why I wanted to be like Joe Namath. I just stared at her amazed that she didn’t know the truth: I was Joe Namath. After several seconds of her silent, wide-eyed glare, she snapped, “Take off the tape.”

In 51 years, I’ve never known a moment of athletic success, let alone glory. And yet those childhood dreams persisted. So, I decided to enter my creaky body in the 2011 Houston Marathon, because there’s a measure of glory in even finishing a 26 mile race and I thought I still might have a shot at that.

If you want to finish 10,998th out of 11,000 runners, it’s important that things start going wrong before you even get out of the car. It was 5:30 a.m. on January 30th, and the temperature was 61. All of my long training runs had been under much colder conditions, and I feared this portended disaster.

At first it was sublime, like being a herd animal during one of the great African migrations; 11,000 pumped up runners streamed toward the rising sun. There were rock, country, and marching bands and even a fat Elvis impersonator to entertain us along the way.

Best of all were the huge crowds lining the course. My race bib had my name written in big letters, so all along the way people shouted, “You got this, Pete!” “Looking good, Pete!” “You the man, Pete!” Many, especially kids, with real admiration in their eyes, vied for me to high-five them as I ran by. It was as far from my everyday life as I’ve ever been.

But the day kept getting hotter, and around mile 17 I was hit with a searing cramp down the length of my right leg. I found myself spread-eagled on the hood of a parked police car desperately trying to stretch the cramp out. The startled officer told me his high school track coach made him drink pickle juice to avoid cramps, which caused me to suddenly remember that there were two energy gels in my pocket; I quickly sucked them down.

Slowly the pain started to ease, and I stood up. Instantly, it cramped-up again and the gel packet shot out of my hand and hit the officer in the chest. I was again writhing on the hood of the patrol car when a paramedic approached and asked me to get in the bus carrying injured runners to the finish line. It seemed like a terrific idea, until I noticed all the sullen, disappointed faces in the bus. The cramp abated slightly, and the tattered remnants of the boy who was Joe Namath stood up and kept going.

I made it another three miles until the cramps stopped me again. A police officer walked over to me and said, “The belly dancers under the bridge have bananas.” I’d never heard those words strung together in a sentence before and looked at him like he was crazy. But under an overpass about fifty yards ahead, jiggling dancers were handing out cramp-killing bananas. I choked one down, felt better, and pushed on.

About a half mile later, both of my hips completely locked up due to a previously undiagnosed condition that picked a particularly inopportune time to manifest itself. I was reduced to slowly waddling along side-to-side like a six foot penguin. Literally thousands of runners sped past me; it was like riding a tricycle in the Indy 500.

Two paramedics on bikes began to circle me like vultures waiting for a wounded elk to keel over. The bus filled with injured runners crawled alongside as the paramedics urged me to quit. They warned me that the water stations had closed, that the streets were now open to traffic, and that they were no longer responsible for my safety. I told them there was no way I could stop only 4 miles from the finish. They shook their heads in disgust and finally rode off, followed sulkily by the bus.

The last several miles were a blur of pain and thirst. Picnickers in a park handed me a beer and a Coke, which I quickly knocked back. My son found me and gave me a sports drink and several energy gel packs. A woman took pictures of me and said my determination was inspiring. In the now wide open streets of downtown Houston, people shouted from cars,” Don’t give up, Pete!” and “Keep going, Pete!” An elderly woman at a bus stop remarked,” It doesn’t look like the race was much fun for you, Pete.”

As I limped toward the towering, ornate finish line, workers were tearing it down. My wife ran up to help me across, but one of the workers told her to let me finish on my own. My time was 7:10:21, a mere 5 hours and 7 minutes off the world record.

My family rushed me off to the hotel room, where, despite drinking a river of sports drinks, I shook on the bed in an agony of muscle cramps and spasms. As a last resort before heading for the hospital, I told them what the police officer had said.

My son went looking for the nearest convenience store and came back with several individually wrapped dill pickles. I couldn’t lift my head, so my daughter stuck a straw through the plastic wrapper, held it up to my mouth, and I sucked down the bitter liquid. Incredibly, within three minutes, the pain and the shaking stopped. I said a silent prayer of thanks for the HPD and fell asleep happily dreaming, at long, long last, of my own small feat of athletic glory.

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