Memorial Day

It's Memorial Day, a time for remembrances.  I miss my children, I miss my parents.

Dad served at Peleliu in 1944,

and Okinawa in 1945,

before he left us in 1986.  Mom was with us for another 13 years before she passed on.

JJ&D, be well.

Happy Memorial Day to all.

Out with the old, in with the new

As a former president of the DCRRC (2009), I want to congratulate my friend Lauren Bullis (pictured below completing a relay race in 2009) upon his election as president of the DC Road Runners Club.   Lauren replaces the divisive and controversial outgoing president who had this to say in a Washington Post article last year about the vast majority of runners in DC:

Brian Danza, president of D.C. Road Runners, divides runners into two groups: the competitive subset, who run for time, and the participatory or recreational group, or “people who do it to check a box.” Speaking on behalf of his running club, he said, “we firmly promote the sport of running in a competitive manner.”

Running a marathon just for the sake of completing one, said Danza, isn’t worth the effort. Danza cites “the advent of social media and bragging” as fueling marathons’ increased popularity. “The way to one-up each other — ‘I’m thinner than you, I’m better than you in various ways, I also checked this box’ — has really perpetuated the growth of the sport.”

Lauren has an attitude about runners, inclusion and participation that is diametrically opposed to that expressed on behalf of the club by Mr. Danza.  I am delighted with the new, promising direction taken by my former running club.

Mom

Happy Mother's Day, Mom.  You were a classic.

Small Colorado prairie town girl, opinionated, scrupulous, intense, you went off at 18 or 19 from Yuma Colorado to San Diego to work in the war industries during WW2.  There you met Dad at a USO dance, just before he shipped out to fight the Japanese, and married him.

And I am here!  He came back from two terrible Pacific battlefields unscathed (somehow) and I am one of six.  (No, we're not Catholic.)

A family staple story is the time he was quivering in bed asleep and you touched him and he woke up instantly and surrounded your neck with his strong fingers, ready to choke you until he realized he was not in a foxhole on Peleliu.  You were terrified, he was horrified, I feel so sorry for what both women and returning men went through in those days.

The world was saved from the Nazis, at a price the two of you paid.  What was the price your six children ever paid for anything?

I don't know.  I know I loved you.

I remember in the tumultuous 60s you driving along the streets on Nantucket (where we had a summer house) looking for a strong willed young man who had been at our house (seeking a date, obviously, with one of my two older sisters) who left with no place to go, to bring him back to our spacious house at 40 Lily Street so he would have a place to spend the night and get on with trying to change the world on the morrow.

Then time ran out.  Dad died at age 61 and you died in 1999 and, well, everything changed.  A ruinous divorce costing a quarter mil (only in America), 3 estranged children who haven't communicated with a single Lamberton in a decade (classic PAS) and I can only hang on the beautiful image of you and Dad to justify my 62 years.