A Leopard's Spots

In 2009 I was elected president of the DC Road Runners Club, a post for which, coming into it as club director of training, I had a lot of ideas that I hoped to implement so the club could become more inclusive of and welcoming to ordinary runners.  I immediately ran into  buzz-saw of opposition from a group of 20-somethings on the board led by Brian Danza, who hated my style (from the training side of the club, not the Alpha side) and my age and within a year I resigned when one board meeting nearly ended in a fracas between me and him and three of his cronies.

I have always regretted that, not the near-fistfight in the restaurant (they totally dissed my friend John Braden at the meeting who was there as my guest) but the whole sorry mess of trying to run underwater all those months.  I learned that you need your people on a board, it's not enough just to do good work and think that people will adhere to long-standing custom and common civility.

I moved on from the club and I rarely speak with anyone from it.  Brian subsequently became president and then recently, after some particularly outrageous remarks dissing ordinary runners that made it into the Washington Post, someone else was elected president (selected would be a better word), from the training side.  : )  Over the weekend, out of the clear blue sky, I received this email from Brian in my personal account:


Hey Peter, long time no see/talk, 

I think I spotted you on the C&O canal today, well actually you were on Cap Crescent, and I was on the C&O. 

I was so concentrated on making it to the bathroom at Fletchers that I didn't notice you until you were directly beside me. 

How's your running been? Still have nagging injuries? You look like you are in the best shape since I've known you. 

B.

Here's what I sent in reply a couple of days later:

Good to hear from you Brian,

No that wasn't me on the C&O, this weekend I was on the W&OD. It must have been my doppelgänger.  

Take care,

Peter

People don't change but I suppose they can mature.

Kilroy

Running on the Mall one workday at noon with two friends from work, one of them wondered about a hidden memorial to American GI's in the forties reputed to be somewhere close by as we ran past the World War II Memorial.  Sort of a secret history of monuments in DC type of thing.

I told him we'd take a look as long as we were there and we went around the outside back of the memorial until we were stopped by a construction fence next to some stairs. "I dunno, and now we're stuck," I told him.

My friend glanced around one last time, perplexed, and then suddenly, there it was! The secret tribute to Kilroy.

My friends thought my little joke was pretty funny.  Now another secret is that there isn't only one but there are actually two of these memorials to GI's in the Good War down there.

"Is it you my blue-eyed son, my darling young one?"

I was riding the rush-hour Orange Line metro train to work and I felt someone looking at me.  I glanced up from my seat and the young man standing by the door with the heavy backpack who entered the car in Arlington, wearing the sweat shirt saying "Washington Basketball," adjusted his earphones and lapsed into blank mode.

I looked at him--thinnish, tallish, with stubble on his face and sandy-colored thin straight hair.  Hmmm.

I know that my estranged oldest son Jimmy, whom I haven't seen in seven years, lives in Arlington.  I saw a picture of him recently, in an article about his current entrepreneurship, and I realized then that I would no longer recognize him if I met him, or any of my three estranged sons, because of the time lapse from when I last saw any of them, when they were adolescents, to the present, now that they would be grown men.

I had studied that photograph, and I had finally recognized aspects of the young man pictured, the detached look in his eyes when he was distracted (his partner was speaking), his cleft chin.  I studied the young man in the railway car--he looked familiar yet he didn't.

The nose didn't seem quite right, too large.  Then I saw a cleft chin on the man.

I got up and went over to him. "Excuse me, sir," I said.

He ignored me. I got more front and center to him and said again, "Excuse me, sir."

He bared an ear.  "Yes?"

"What's your name?"  Without hesitation he answered, "Paul." 

"I'm sorry, you look like someone I used to know."  "No problem." 

He replaced his earphone and went back into blank mode.  I went over and stood by the opposite door.

I watched to see where he got off.  He exited the train at Foggy Bottom with a mass of GWU students.

I know Jimmy has never attended college, so it probably wasn't him.  Maybe next time.

And Still More Happy Happy

Happy b'day, youngest son (pictured here with your loving Grandmother, who gave the money that allowed you to go to the Gow School, and was generous with me as well which enabled me to fully fund your college tuition and fees). I trust that you are alive (your Mother wouldn't tell me when I asked her in Nov.) and hope that you are well (she wouldn't tell me that either).

And More Happy Happy

It's a new dawn… Happy birthday to my oldest, who will be closing out his twenties soon.  (A hat-trick striker with the McLean Sting, below, and also the FYPC Lightning.  But then again his agenda-driven "counselor" when he was a youth, who was his Mother's "counselor" as well, convinced him that I was living my life vicariously through his athletic achievements.  In my opinion, she was and is full of pure crap.)

I haven't spoken to him since 2007, nor seen him since perhaps 2005, but hope springs eternal.  I read an article about him, relating to a project on Kickstarter, in November, so at least I know he's alive.  His Mother, a public school teacher, stonily refuses to tell me anything at all about him or my 2 other sons.  (He's the one on the right, below, I think, although this article describes him as the one on the left.)

He lives, I surmise, either with his Mother a couple of miles away or else somewhere else in Arlington, the next town over.  Yesterday I sent a birthday greeting card to him care of his Mother's address asking him to call me about the VA prepaid tuition plan I am the owner of, and so I can relay some important family news. Perhaps this will be the year… .  (The collage below featuring our first-born is circa 1987.)

At noon today I'll be having lunch at the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover, Jim.  (Happier times, before the "experts" who prey on divorce situations as they suck the Estate dry and drive their own agendas got involved.)

Happy Happy

One of my favorite memories from law school is a party some students in my small section threw at their townhouse to celebrate the end of our three years of study.  I was an oddity in my small section in that I was older than everyone else in the section and I had three kids already.

Two of my children, four year old Jimmy and two year old Johnny, were there with me enjoying the party and I was keeping an eye on them in the hub-bub.  There was a keg of beer out back in a little enclosed outdoor patio and everyone was festive at the conclusion of our last finals week.

Once when I hadn't seen either of my two kids in a minute or two, I got up to look for them as any dad would do.  There weren't any stairs in the townhouse and they couldn't get out of the premises so I wasn't overly worried about them.

I found them soon enough, out back in the momentarily deserted back patio.  They had obviously been watching the comings and goings of everyone and observing the frequency with which my friends had been going out the back door to get a cup of beer.

They had waited for their chance and when the coast was clear, the two of them had gone out into the little fenced-in space to do what the adults did.  As I went outside, I saw that Jimmy was furiously pumping the keg and Johnny, as directed by his older brother, was dutifully holding a plastic cup in his chubby little fists under the dispensing hose, waiting for the golden elixir that everyone was enjoying so much to appear.

The only problem was that Jimmy didn't know how to push the dispensing lever on the outlet to allow the beer to flow after being pumped.  But amidst Jimmy's hurried whispering to Johnny to hold the cup more steady and the older boy's frenzied pumping, they were certainly trying to imitate the big people.

Happy Birthday Johnny.  I love you.

Ringing in the New Year

…with lunch at the Lost Dog at noon today.

Perhaps I'll see one or more of you there then.

Or perhaps, some other time then.