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memories

Confirming the Not Good At That list

I did something unusual today. I got in a pool.

Now, I like the water. One of my earliest memories is being fished out of the deep end of a pool I had no business being in. As a child the local YMCA had the fish-themed swimming lessons and I made it up to the shark level. I was a certified lifeguard, back in the old style where you had to go get people and in the kinder, gentler, let’s don’t get hurt or sued and throw in a float instead style. I have memories, for some thing or other, of turning blue jeans into a floatation device. I’ve treaded water for more than an hour. I’ve been a SCUBA diver for two decades.

I’m good with the water, at peace with what I can and can’t do there, particularly below the surface. You still have some control of things there. If you know yourself you have fairly defined ideas of your limits, and that is satisfying and comforting; I’m not afraid of the water because I know what I am and what I am not, he said, hoping that sounded wise. But I treat it recreationally.

One thing I am not is a lap swimmer.

Never could hold a straight line. That’s just the basic problem. Olympic and national champion swimming coach David Marsh once told me “You have to respect someone willing to spend hours and hours, swimming hundreds of laps, to shave a thousandth of a second off of their best time.”

I respect that level of dedication and discipline, even more in the context of things I’d never do. I’m not that kind of swimmer.

So there I was today, cool new reflective race goggles, in an outside lane of an outdoor pool with the temperature hovering around 65 degrees and falling and trying to swim.

I haven’t done anything more than tread water or float on my back in a year or so.

Today I just tried to make the goggles fit. They didn’t. Water got in. I don’t like water in my eyes. So I quickly realized you don’t clear goggles like you would clear a diving mask:

It just brings in more water. Because your nose isn’t inside the confined area, of course. But, hey, the training is never forgotten. So up on the rope line, work on the goggles. Swim a bit, fiddle a bit, swim a bit, drown my eyes awhile. And so on. Finally this was resolved. Finally I can swim. Only I’ve all but forgotten how to breathe. I like to breathe. Breathing, in my book, is vastly underrated. This goes on in a thoroughly unsatisfying manner.

Finally it all comes together. I can see. I can breathe. I can actually think about the stroke. I get through four circuits of the freestyle stroke — really bringing my arms and shoulders out of the water and overhead and down properly — and realize this hurts my shoulder. So the now 10-month old injury and surgery still limits me.

So I do other things, try other strokes. Back to the sidestroke and a modified breaststroke and my favorite: underwater, handcuffed criminal stroke.

But I did 700 meters — a warmup, really — which is more than I would have done otherwise.

Also, it turned cold again today. Chilly, in fact. Downright unseasonable and noticeable, too. I’d complain, but there is snow in places like Iowa and Minnesota that would also like a bit of May, thank you. I’ve mentioned it. Remarked, maybe. But I haven’t complained too much. And if I have, it was entirely good-natured, because some places are dealing with unseasonal May snows.

But I would like spring to come back, because the first part of summer can hurt if it just shows up without a preamble.

Tonight, baseball:

After falling 6-1 to Ole Miss tonight, Auburn is now 16-51 against the SEC in the big four sports — football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and baseball — since the 2012 SEC baseball tournament. That’s a bad year.

Alabama / cycling / memories / Monday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
11
Mar 13

A very rainy Monday

This is today:

I drove in that, trotted across a parking lot in that and then watched it from indoors fall on the quad at Samford. It is a rainy day. That’s about an inch of rain, apparently. I question our precipitation measuring methods. This was a lot of rain.

Hard to conceive that yesterday looked like this:

That was about 20 miles into my ride yesterday evening, about halfway back down the home road. It gives the impression in this stretch of riding on a ridge line. I’m not sure why, there’s no real drop off and houses dot the right side. But the pastures on the left tend to slope down a tiny bit, so you feel like you’re riding high and on top of everything. Only the hill you just crested isn’t that much of a hill, really, but everything is relative and when you are surrounded by rollers you can be King of the Molehill.

In a few more weeks, and a little to the right of that shot, there will be the most amazing wildflowers. A few days after that, and back down the hill to the left, there will be a yard filled with eight-foot-tall flowering bushes. This is a fragrant area.

Anyway. Being a rainy Monday, I made today Copeland Cookie Day in my class.

Dr. Gary Copeland was one of our grad school professors. He died last January, just after his retirement which was doubly sad in that he was so very much looking forward to spending more time with his grandchildren.

He was the kind of man that people just don’t stop missing, I think. I had the honor of being invited to a Facebook page in his memory that remains active even today.

And so I wrote there that it was Copeland Cookie Day in class. In honor of the great man and his epistemology and ontology class I pick a day each semester, put a picture of his on the board, tell them about this colorful character, feed the students cookies and, most importantly, talk about things that aren’t on the syllabus.

It is one of everyone’s favorite classes. Mostly because of the cookies.

Dr. Copeland was the instructor of my first class at Alabama and was on my comps committee. He was one of the good ones, and I like telling students about him, and his Copeland fests and taking students out to eat and his general kind and giving nature.

When I wrote about it this afternoon on Facebook 16 people liked it, most of them his former students. At least one professor said he was going to make his own Copeland Cookie Day and word is getting around our department that I do this. He would laugh at the silliness of it. But he was a giver and would have enjoyed it, too, I think.

So we talked in class about trips we’d taken so far and how some people who have similar majors from elsewhere are waiting tables or how someone read a survey about how it was a tough career. And those things are important to hear, but for freshmen and sophomores there are a lot of positives too. At the end of the day its not unlike most other things: work hard at it and good things can come to you. Dodge raindrops where you can, look fondly back on sunny days and forward to even nicer ones.

It is that time of year, where the weather always seems on on the cusp of ever nicer days, and we’re all looking forward. The oncoming Spring Break isn’t a bad excuse, either. Not that anyone is counting the days, the number of which is four.

Auburn / baseball / cycling / Friday / history / memories / things to read / video — Comments Off
8
Mar 13

An altogether lovely Friday evening

Shelby County, Ala. made The Daily Show earlier this week:

And then Shelby County made the Colbert Report:

So there’s that.

Here’s some stupid:

A Michigan elementary school is defending its decision to confiscate a third-graders batch of homemade cupcakes because the birthday treats were decorated with plastic green Army soldiers.

Casey Fountain told Fox News that the principal of his son’s elementary school called the cupcakes “insensitive” — in light of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

“It disgusted me,” he said. “It’s vile they lump true American heroes with psychopathic killers.”

The principal chimes in and, as you might expect, does not acquit herself especially well of the situation.

Here’s another one, some 100 students have been suspended for taking part in Harlem Shake videos:

According to the National Coalition against Censorship, about 100 students across the country have been suspended for making and posting their own version of the viral video on the Web. School districts have offered a variety of reasons for the suspensions, said NCAC Director Joan Bertin, with most saying that the videos, which feature suggestive dancing, are inappropriate. However, Bertin said, she believes that regardless of how the videos could be interpreted, decisions to suspend students and keep them out of class cross the line. The NCAC has compared the schools’ actions to the plot of the 1984 film “Footloose,” in which a town outlaws dancing and rock music.

“It seems a rather disproportionate response by educators to something that, at most, I would characterize as teenage hijinks,” Bertin said.

[…]

“We are very strongly in the camp of telling schools that this is protected speech. Even if it’s unpleasant, we do protect that kind of speech in this country and should, as much for students as adults,” she said.

Disproportionate response seems the right words to use there.

When I was a little tot my mother used to tell me about how dirty Birmingham was. It was an industrial center back then, the Pittsburgh of the South, right up until the 1970s. Bio-tech, medical service, UAB and banking changed much of the economic landscape. Between those shifts and more strict ecological rules it changed things in the air too.

The air, my mother said, used to be brown.

Never sure if I’ve ever seen a picture of that, until today. That was the summer of ’72, when there probably was no such thing as air quality reports and ozone alerts. Your emphysema will kick in just looking at it.

And so it was that I enjoyed a much more clear evening outdoors tonight. There’s a lot to be grateful for, if you like, and being breathless under blooming pear trees because your bicycle has your heart rate up is one of those things. Better than the heavy industrial alternative, at least. I got in 21 quick miles this evening, my first time on the bike in several weeks because of travel and sickness. That’s the way of it: build up a bit of form and a few miles, something else always comes along to distract me.

At the baseball game, Auburn led off with a triple, one of Jackson Burgreen’s two hits of the night. He’d also score later in the inning, before sending in a run in the second:

We moved from behind the plate to over third base, so we could enjoy the heckling. Brown had four errors in the seventh (they’d make another later) when I had what was roundly considered the line of the night. The Brown shortstop was standing on third, and he was just about the only guy in his entire infield that hadn’t erred. So I asked him “J.J., do you know what you can make with four Es?”

The professional hecklers in Section 111 made the sound, so I simply said “A Taylor Swift song.”

Turned around to see them bowing to me. It was a bit awkward.

Brown’s left fielder, Will Marcal, had a nice night. He gathered two hits and demonstrated a cannon in the field. I bet no one runs on him more than once:

Auburn won 9-4 and we caught the Brown head coach enjoying all of the playful little jokes the hecklers were sharing with his team. Guess we’ll work on him more tomorrow.

family / memories / Tuesday — Comments Off
5
Mar 13

Happy Birthday mom

I left her a voicemail while I was outside and it was gray and cold and windy. She called me back while I was in the library, but I needed to leave anyway. She was on the way home from a movie, trying to get back before winter fell, so she could sit and enjoy the rest of her evening in a warm, dry place. We talked about old friends and impossible things we did and our general awesomeness among other things. We’d sent her flowers earlier in the day and she’d texted me but now she said in person on the phone that they were beautiful and colorful, which is exactly what I’d hoped for.

She had a little smile in her voice when she said it, which was the other thing I’d hoped for, and constituted the best part of the day.

And many more …

iPhone / journalism / memories / overwriting / photo / Samford / weekend — Comments Off
23
Feb 13

Travel day

It was off the main road, and off the road that became the main road when your sense adjusted. It was down off that, vertically down. Under a bridge, beneath an overpass. It was by the railroad. Not too far away from the Church of the Deliverance, if I recall, that I pulled into a dusty, unkempt yard and walked on to an ancient porch filled with the wrecked memories and peeling dreams of some long ago time. I knocked on the screen of this house and a small, frail old woman answered, still mostly in her curlers and wrapped up in her robe.

At first I was sure I’d disturbed her, but I came to realize over time that this was her general appearance these days. On this day, the first day, however, I was there to ask her about the worst thing in her world. Here was this skinny white kid standing on her porch and in the back room was her even skinnier son, and would she mind if I sat with him.

I was there, mostly, to watch him die.

Which is terribly dramatic, but that was the story I was writing for a terrific features class I took in undergrad. The professor wanted descriptive narrative, and I’ve thought a lot about that story today and yesterday. I’ve been at the SEJC conference in Tennessee with some of the Samford students, where the theme this year was “the power of narrative in a digital age.” We heard incredible speakers talk about the words that reshape everything, the images that set the story and they’d walked the students through exercises on how to build a narrative in a really easy, straightforward way. No need to be intimidated, take these four things — characters, moving through time, encountering an obstacle and acting until resolution — and you’re halfway to writing the story.

It is a great list. It works. You can tell masterful stories that way. For my personal narrative formula I would add two tangential things: smells and textures. Smells are so common and so active in our memory. Even if you aren’t at the scene of that school we learned about yesterday, the suggestion of mildew or cheap spaghetti sauce or sweaty students has a way of transporting you into the scene.

Textures can be that way too, and that was one of those things I learned by sitting with the guy who was struggling in the last days of his life. I spent time with him over the course of several weeks that term. He wasn’t much older than me, in his mid-late 20s, but he had the kind of cancer you can’t fight without a presidential insurance plan. To see where he was raised, where his mother brought him home to, it was obvious what would happen here. It was only a question of when and how badly.

But I’d found this family through Hospice. I met the local director and convinced her of my project and she found this old woman who was really not prepared to endure the process of burying her son, but had a great, weary strength about her, and a sad cheer that offset your earliest need to empathize with her. She had spirit and she had the Lord and she had her son. And, for some reason, she agreed when the Hospice director asked if I could come meet her son. He still had his smile, and Hospice was helping to make him comfortable and his entire world didn’t involve much beyond this crappy hospital bed and the four walls of the front room of his mother’s home. He was happy to have some different company for a while, I think.

I was so proud to know that guy. He was facing it head on by then, but that suggests a lot about what he’d probably already endured. He’d be perfectly still, talking with you, eyes open, smile on his face, eyes closed, still talking, and then asleep. He’d snore softly and wake up 15 minutes later and keep answering the same question, usually without a reminder.

I always thought it was very brave of his mother to leave her son alone with a stranger like that. I can’t imagine how the protective instinct, already so frazzled, must have felt about this kid, a student, asking to spend so much of her precious time with her boy. But then she used that time to nap, or get some things done around the house. She came to trust that at least he had someone to sit with him for a while. I was proud of that.

And I wrote this story, which was probably not nearly as good as I thought, and twice as bad as I remember. But I remember that I was very happy with it. I’d gone to talk to the guy a time or two without writing anything, just being friendly. I’d rush out and jot notes afterward. And one day I visited and did the real serious interview part, notebook, pen, cramping hands and all of that. And I went back another time to hang out with him, just intent on getting every detail about the place committed to memory. I paid the most fastidious attention to every crack in the ceiling and creak his bed made. I wrote in the story about the color of the walls and the softness of the guy’s hands and tried to describe his gentle, whistling snore. I didn’t know anything about writing about smells yet, but I described his mother and the way she looked around the room when we talked. I wrote about the guy’s hopes and his life and what he still wanted to do. I probably got some of his music into the story. I wrote about the angel sculptures that were hanging on the wall above him.

My professor asked me “What were they made of?”

Texture. That’s part of the narrative too.

On Google Maps, today, that house looks a lot different than it did almost 15 years ago. I should stop by sometime and see if they know what happened to that nice lady after her son passed away. I sent her a card, a note of sympathy and thanks. Never did ask her about those angels though.

Some things, I felt at the time, you should just be able to keep for yourself.

Anyway. We are all back home today. There was a big two hour faculty meeting I attended this morning, so I missed most of the day’s sessions at the conference, one on videography and another on snake handling. Hate that I missed it, as it was a long talk by the reporter of this magazine-style piece. I would have liked to been able to hear the entire presentation because Julia Duin, is on the faculty at Union and a three-time Pulitzer nominee. But I can rest easy knowing I have read perhaps both her story and the best book ever written about the topic, Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain.

The conference gave the students another awards luncheon, this one for the on-site competition. The Crimson’s sports editor won the top spot for sports writing. He was so excited he knocked over his chair standing to go get his certificate.

After that we made a quick stop at the bookstore and then spent far, far too long in the van. Party animals that these students are, they were all asleep before we’d gotten out of Tennessee. I don’t think I heard a word out of any of them until we got back into Jefferson County.

I made it home just after dark. It was nice to sit on the couch again, pet the cat and stare at nothing. Think I did that for most of the night.

Finally decided that I think they were plain white plaster angels. They’d been given a bit of discoloration by a little too much dust and a yellowing light bulb overhead. But they were with him all the same.