Time for The Yankee’s big race. Today marked her second aquabike and the first of the season. We were up before sunrise and out at the race site hours before the sun finally appeared. It was gray and cloudy and the water was cold, but she was swimming. Better her than me.
This is the starting line. All the different color swim caps mean different race groups:
This is the first guy out of the water. He was moving very fast:
Here’s The Yankee’s heat. She’s somewhere up front:
A few minutes later came out of the lake after her 600-meter swim. It was a short run up to the transition area:
She’s off on her bike for a quick 13.8 mile ride. She’d pass these other ladies right away:
Meanwhile, here is the amateur group starting their race. This group also includes the handicapped competitors. Imagine swimming around a lake hauling a floating raft and then biking and running around the town. Those guys were awesome and their teammates were all smiles:
Remember that first guy out of the water? Here he is back from the cycling leg and getting ready to run. He isn’t even in the park yet, let alone the transition area. Look at his feet:
He’s already out of his shoes. He’ll hit the transition area and then sprint off for his 5K, which he’ll finish in about 18 minutes. It is a sprint triathlon, after all. Here’s the first woman back in from her bike leg:
Not too much later The Yankee came back in after a great ride around John Tanner Park:
And all of that earned her some bling. Here’s her silver:
After the awards we packed up, hit Chick-fil-A on our way out of town and got home in time for a nap.
Her medal is hanging over the sink which means, I think, that I’m doing the dishes for the next several days.
It took me a long time to come around to the idea that the anchors were still on the air as they completely lost their composure over what has to be the dumbest interview they’ve done in a while.
And then we watched the first episode of this guy’s show the other night. Surely, I thought to myself, there are more interesting Olympians. Smarter Olympians. But the existence of this show suggests otherwise.
It is a good thing, I’ve told people who brought this show up, that he swims really fast.
We had dinner with a large group of people here:
It is one of those places where the door handle is an elaborate set of antlers. Same with the lighting, which is full of antler-pronged ornamentation. The food is all local. The tables and the bar are all hewn from felled local timber and … oh the bountiful quantities of bacon on the menu.
I had the turkey avocado sandwich with bacon and a Caesar salad. Somehow there was no bacon on the salad, but that’s about the only exception on the menu. They do a bacon-drizzled popcorn, which is better than you’d imagine.
The Hound is pretty intense like that. They are casual in their intensity. Or is it intense in their casualness? Who can say. Look at that menu.
I sent a picture of the menu to a friend, an aficionado of bacon. He said “You had me at Big Fat Steak.”
The flames were fueled by raw gasoline, which was stored on the partially emptied barges as they were docked for cleaning at Oil Recovery Co. of Alabama’s Marine Gas Free Facility.
Three people were cleaning the ship when a fire apparently broke out, catching the gasoline and causing the explosions.
They were transported to USAMC Wednesday night, where they remain in critical condition as of 9:15 a.m., according to USAMC spokesman Bob Lowery.
They were the only people on the barges at the time of the explosions, according to Lt. Mike Clausen of the U.S. Coast Guard.
The Triumph, that now infamous hard-luck Carnival vessel? It is taking on repairs just across the water:
“It literally sounded like bombs going off around. The sky just lit up in orange and red,” he said, “We could smell something in the air, we didn’t know if it was gas or smoke.” Waugh said he could feel the heat from the explosion and when he came back inside, his partner noticed he had what appeared to be black soot on his face.
A Franklin County woman was arrested after police said her 2-year-old grandson tested positive for cocaine …
Deanna Leigh Fretwell, 38, is charged with chemical endangerment of a child. She was arrested after Russellville police said they received a tip from the Department of Human Resources, the report said.
The most recent Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP) statistics of the number of households receiving food stamps shows that 23,087,886 households participated in January 2013 – an increase of 889,154 families from January 2012 when the number of households totaled 22,188,732.
The most recent statistics from the United States Census Bureau– from December 2012– puts the number of households in the United States at 115,310,000. If you divide 115,310,000 by 23,087,866, that equals one out of every five households now receiving food stamps.
So this isn’t a recovery so much as a series of selectively moving around numbers.
At times like these we must ask ourselves: What would Ryan Lochte do?
My friend the great Ike Pigott came to speak to my class today.
Ike works at Alabama Power and he is a great idea man. His time at Red Cross and, before, that, ABC 33/40 make him a terrific pitch man. He talked to the class about public relations and social media and crisis communications.
He talked about the last series of tornadoes that passed through the state. It occurred to me that every pro we’ve talked to in that class this semester has told tornado war stories. I’m sure every student who is from some other place is wondering why they live here now.
With about a half-hour left in the class the fire alarm went off. Everyone in the room looked at me.
I’m supposed to know this answer.
Fortunately I remembered what we are supposed to do in a fire alarm. (It isn’t like this happens all the time.) So we got our things, felt the door to make sure it wasn’t hot, walked down the hall and exited the building to our exterior gathering space. Class continued as the fire truck pulled up:
It was cold and damp and we couldn’t see any smoke anywhere. Firefighters walked inside and, a few minutes later, walked back out. I walked over to them and said “I have a class full of journalism students wondering what is going on.”
Turns out someone in the kitchen in the cafeteria, which is in another wing of the same building, started cooking something without exhaust fans and that built up smoke for the sensors and so there we were, talking about crisis communication with a firetruck in the background.
That’s a Wednesday.
We went back inside and, at the end of the class, the fire alarm went off again. Turns out that we had gone long on our class, but the students were so caught up in what Ike was talking about that they didn’t mind. He’s just that good.
Also today was the first meeting with the incoming editor of the Crimson. I was up late last night putting together information for him. Want the job? Here are 27 pages of easy reading. Mark, set, go.
He’s been around the paper for the last two years as a section editor and is a smart guy, so I’m sure he’ll do well.
This year’s staff has done a fine job and I’m proud of a lot of things they’ve done. I always like that first new meeting though. It is one of my favorite parts of the year.
Usually it is warmer, mid-April and all. Tonight parts of the state are enjoying temperatures 30 degrees below their seasonal averages. Spring will arrive on a more permanent basis, eventually. Right?
Or maybe we’ll just go directly into summer.
Things to read: The War Eagle Reader was kind enough to reprint the thing I wrote the other day. It let me give it another edit and convinced me I still didn’t adequately make my point. There’s always next time.
Most importantly I need to thank the entire Auburn Family. You all are truly the best fans in the country. You’ve been on our side through thick and thin and that is appreciated way more than you think. I’ll never truly understand why you all love that goofy, embarrassing, silly, little dance that I did against ‘Bama but I appreciate the love that you have always showed me.
Alabama state senators and a Senate official stepped in between two of their colleagues during a shouting match between the two men that occurred after a controversial ruling by Lt. Gov. Kay Ivey on Wednesday night.
Plastic wrappers and other pieces of litter rustled like tumbleweed across the empty space under the bridge yesterday afternoon.
Two hours later, enough chairs were set up to seat several hundred of Nashville’s homeless, enough chicken and baked beans cooked to feed them all.
And a few minutes later, while some were still finishing up their rainbow cake dessert, a cloth was rolled down the aisle and my friend Amanda walked through a crowd of her homeless friends to meet her fiancé at the altar under the overpass.
photo / weekend — Comments Off on Catching up 21 Apr 13
The weekly place with extra pictures, because these things are art and need to be shared. Or not art, but would otherwise be deleted with no fanfare as they’ve not found a home elsewhere on the site. On with it then.
How they dress up tables in Louisville, a little Rip Van Winkle and a fake arrangement really gussies up a place:
A piece of Civil War era grapeshot dug up from north Georgia. This one belongs to my mother. It was given to her by the owner of the property where it was found, the site of the last defensive battle before Sherman made it into Atlanta. There was a terrible storm during the two-day clash where almost 2,000 were hurt or killed in May of 1864. Another violent storm 113 years later brought my grandfather’s plane down in the same place, the worst aviation disaster in Georgia’s history. A lot has happened in that one spot.
A view from the Saturn rocket at the Ala.-Tenn. line, this time as we moved south. This view is exiting to the rest area. Just to the left as I snapped this firefighters were trying to free someone from a trapped vehicle. The medical helicopter had come to a complete rest on the interstate. Someone had died in that accident.
It took almost three years, but ol’ Harvey Updyke proved the only thing he’s ever been capable of proving, that spirit goes beyond a football game, that a place is more than a jersey, and heart is more than a scoreboard.
Saturday was the big day, the last roll of the old Toomer’s Corner oaks. It was orchestrated and planned and monumentally huge. (The Auburn equestrian team, which just won a national championship of their own, will get the final honor.)
Thousands upon thousands of people were there. They stood chest to back and shoulder to shoulder and that crowd jammed the corner and the four roads. Everyone had a great time, coming away with that old familiar feeling: this is a family reunion.
For some people it was a refutation of a malignancy of misguided fandom. For others it was an excuse to have a party. For all, it was an opportunity to hear what comes next. Now that the old oaks are coming out of that spot, ending a run of about 75 years, there is plenty to look ahead to.
But Toomer’s Corner always taught me to look back. You didn’t get too many rolls dropped on the back of your head as a freshman before you learn to always be on the lookout. In a way, this too was an opportunity to look back at the fine spirit of something we’ve long enjoyed.
I’ve written about this for The War Eagle Reader and for the Smithsonian and a few other places. I’m always trying to capture this feeling, share the sense so that those who aren’t lucky enough to be there can find their place in it too.
The problem is that whenever you do this, it always comes off as hokey and cheesy. How do you explain this small town thing? This silly little thing that amuses us, that we look forward to, that we’ve lately lamented and, Saturday, celebrated beyond comparison?
The best way to understand a culture is to figure out why the important things are important and why the small things are important. To ask yourself why these things are so is to find all of the silly answers. In this case, it is the celebration of a victory, which started either to emulate the old telegram system that used to send home news of games from far away, or a spontaneous celebration of the joy of having too much toilet paper. There are several theories and apocryphal stories about how and why this began, but let’s be honest, it is just fun. The tradition started out as rolling the trees after big road wins. Today this is a way to continue the game, the event, the championship and the celebration of a moment after the moment is gone.
It is the place where we say “Meet me at Toomer’s Corner,” which means a whole lot more than ‘See you there.’ Town and campus come together here, the corner where everything meets, where we make the 400 yard march from the stadium to the place where we celebrate some more. You see old friends, make new ones and take pictures in one of the happier, more laid back places you can be. This is where the chants and cheers don’t stop, where the players come to join their classmates, alumni and fans.
Toomer’s Corner also taught me to look down. My favorite thing about rolling Toomer’s has always been watching the tiniest Tigers. College students often yield to children in this place where parents let their little ones actually play in the street. They have the run of the place. They’re flinging rolls, they’re turning themselves into Charmin mummies. They’re climbing on the gates, up the surrounding trees and receiving the gift of extra rolls from the big kids.
The picture above was from the 2010 national championship. That was the last time I rolled the corner; that was a memory, a fine one to end on. We make our memories, but we make them for others too, that’s what is happening when Toomer’s gets rolled. These days I catch rolls to give to children, the younger the better. It is more important to me to build their memories.
I like to take visitors, because if you can’t write about Toomer’s Corner and make sense of it, you surely can’t tell someone about it. You simply need the experience. I taught my wife how to throw a roll of toilet paper. She figured it out just in time for the 2010 SEC championship.
I’ve had the good fortune to take my mother a few times. She gets in to it despite herself. A few years ago we treated my step-father to his first football game and his first trip to the corner.
My in-laws came down for their first game in 2010, a quiet non-conference game which was unlike anything they’d ever seen up north. Rolling Toomer’s is unlike anything you see most anywhere, too.
Family, friends, everyone comes away impressed, and that’s after those cream puff games. “You have to remember,” I solemnly tell them “that the degree of rolling Toomer’s Corner is directly proportional to the importance of the win.” They imagine and wish they were here on those nights when covering great distancesyou can find the toilet paper covering great distances
One night I popped a flash on my camera as people rolled the corner and I could see the tiny cotton particulates of celebration floating in the air around me, two blocks away from the trees. That’s a fervor.
Toomer’s taught us to look forward, too. This is just the tip of the experience, but all of Auburn has a way of growing into you. The farther away you get, the more deeply it ties itself to you. The longer you’ve been away the closer you hold it. You’re just starting something here, but you’ll carry the place forever.
Below are the gates. The men that put them in place were staring down a world war, and some of them would go off and find themselves fighting it in the next year. But first they had to finish things up here, and the class of 1917 had to build that entryway. (The eagles came later.)
Saturday we learned that, in the new plan for Toomer’s Corner, the gates will stay in place. And that’s maybe the best news of all. For all that Auburn can be it is important that we always remember who she was before us.
Here’s why: what she was defines who she’ll be. What we become is dictated in some way by what we were. I think of Auburn as an instrument of potential, but as Toomer’s Corner regularly demonstrates, it is also about spirit and heart.
I wrote, two years ago, the day we learned this day was coming, “Auburn and her family are stronger than oak and more sturdy than history. We’re going to say “Meet me at Toomer’s” for generations yet. The power of dixieland is going to be just fine.”
Saturday went a long way toward proving that right, but it is no prophecy. The clues are all around.
We’re all little dots in the immediately famous helicopter shot. We are all the central players in the more narrow perspectives we hold on from the ground. We’re all in those moments from years ago, frozen in other people’s photographs. I always study those pictures with wonder. Where is that woman now? What does that guy do these days? We’re all in the photographs yet to come, too.
There will be more trees. There will be more times when police officers playfully stand there and let the kids roll them, more times where people watch and dance from the windows across the street. Someone is always going to be willing to shimmy up the poles that hold the traffic lights in place. There will be more parents and college students and guests all delighting in the fun silliness of the thing.
At the biggest moment any of us could imagine, I was fortunate to stand under the old trees with my beautiful, talented wife — who I turned into an Auburn woman in the course of a single tailgate, who later joined the faculty — and celebrated a national championship with thousands of friends:
That’s a great memory, but not hardly the best. And Saturday, we were reminded once again, that this has never been about the trees, but about all of those people, our people.
