Except for an old man, Sam, I am alone in the hospital room, a twenty-year-old college student. My grandfather’s name was Sam. But in 1976, he'd been dead a few years. But he wouldn’t be in the hospital room with me, not if I think about it.
Grandfather and I spent a lot of time together during the last decade of his life. He was not one to put himself out. We were not close so much as he had slowed from age, me by instinct.
As a boy, like young John Franklin in Sten Nadolny’s “Discovery of Slowness,” I would happily spend hours doing nothing but sitting in the fork of a tree, thinking. Except for the sports field, I felt odd whenever I did anything in a hurry. Grandfather and I would sit in silence, listening through the static, a weak signal from Illinois, to the Chicago Cubs (Fergie Jenkins, working on a one-hitter, eleven strikeouts and counting; only run a solo homer, his in the fifth) on the portable radio that Grampa kept on the arm of the LazyBoy. Me, "Just fine, Grampa," in his hardback kitchen one.
I’m company. My mother’s father – an English warrior, Yanks in his sights, the march on Washington, burning the White House to the ground – is never happier but when Fergie, the great Canuck, is putting down one Yank after another. Grampa was home guard to King Teddy in London, the image on a coin he kept in his pocket. Once, I touched the hard-packed muscle where a bullet entered his arm below the elbow. Fragments of bone. “Press hard,” he said, and when I did he threw up his arm in mock salute.
If I’m to die tonight, let Grampa be the one who guides my first steps. “Keep your nose clean, boy.” In his gray cardigan with fuzz balls, flannel slacks and ruff-rimmed slippers. Dressed for eternity.
“But what am I going to wear?” I say it out loud. Hospital Sam doesn’t reply but to hit the buzzer. Again. Good old Sam.
“What is it this time?” the nurse asks Sam.
“I heard him. He was trying to say something. Real words. Could make something out; definitely a question. And the word, ‘Where.’ ”
“L,” she turns to me. “You are in hospital. In good hands.” She touches me somewhere. My arm? “Get me out of here! Home. I want to go home.”
She still has her hand on me. “You’ll be better if you don’t fight rest.” She hasn’t heard me; they can’t hear me. “Don’t try to talk.”
Okay. I’m back in the fork of the tree. Trying, and failing, to make sense of what is happening to me.
My wife M and I are close to ditching TV, basic cable and an ancient set. We need HD, flat screens for a mindless crime show, the occasional movie, the World Cup every four years? Recently though, with M out of town, I land on the reality show, “The Biggest Losers.” A contestant is jogging alone on a highway. “To finish this marathon is one thing,” the man says. He crosses the line, with a time readout that shows just over four hours. Respectable for a first marathon. “But to keep it up, to call myself a marathoner. That is really my goal. That would really be something.”
In my first post, I mention rose, the mystery of identity. When I’m running I don't wear headphones; rather songs often come to me. One is “Shining Star” by Earth, Wind and Fire. “Shining star for you to be, what your life can truly be.” The mystic rose teaches us that beginnings, as in the simple seed, can lead to vastly different endings, the glorious and various beauty of its bloom. The rose – from the seed to the bloom – signifies a search for identity, one that is constantly shifting and eluding us. If we trust in the mystic rose, we have faith in the star, one that will help guide us. “You’re a shining star, no matter who you are.”
Earlier identities are equally mysterious as the ones we are living now. Funny, but I don’t even know now if I would call myself a marathoner. Perhaps I will if I qualify for Boston. But for this blog – and for a memoir I am starting under the working title “The Inside Track: Running for Your Life” – I’ve been giving a lot of thought back to that time when I started to run.
In my first days out of hospital, I remember mostly the shame. I have never considered myself a vain person, but my change in appearance was so drastic that I literally looked like a stranger, even to myself. Our college journalism department was relatively small, so there was no place to hide for a painfully limping young man in clothes that didn’t come close to fitting. Only my beard was full. I remember standing in the cafeteria holding my tray before the checkout girl who a semester ago I had had a mild flirtation. She drops coins in my hand, careful not to brush her fingers with mine.
That summer I took a job in the linen department of the Chateau Lake Louise in the Alberta Rockies. With my friend from Toronto, we leave by car from Ontario for the long drive out West. I am in the back seat of my car, lying down, my leg elevated to keep the swelling down. The clots had diminished, but I was still on heavy blood-thinning meds, which guarded against a recurrence, odds of which, I was warned by doctors before I left the hospital, were higher if I were sitting down or lying without keeping my injured leg at least as high as my heart. We drive for at most an hour before we stop at the side of the road, where I hobble painfully around the car, once, twice, three times, before I get back in and resume the position. Doctors, of course, wouldn’t have advised me to take this job in my condition. Not to be so far away from home, to travel hundreds of miles in this way only weeks after leaving hospital. But I was twenty years old and done with doctors. I had a month’s supply of blood-thinning meds, and then I would be on my own. I would walk and then run myself back to health.
So I took my first step on a Rocky Mountain trail. I don’t remember what brand the sneaker was, or anything about what I was wearing. Each step, I do remember, hurt like hell. And the more vertical the path, the harder it was for me because, the doctors explained, the vein valves in my calf had been permanently damaged. In a steep climb, the blood would rush down the leg but, because of the valve damage, would be slow to return, which caused my leg to swell. That first few months in the Rockies, my leg was more stump than flesh and bone. I was slow, would stop, sometime for minutes at a time because of the pain and to catch my breath. But I kept going. Walking the trails above the Chateau Lake Louise. By myself because mine was a single-minded, maybe even obsessive, path.
I do know I wasn’t thinking about mystic roses or shining stars in those days. I ran a little cross country in high school, but primarily was drawn to team sports, ice hockey, of course, and the spotter in Varsity Volleyball, the Varsity Soccer goalie. I’d seen the movie “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” which hardly encouraged me to take up running before my health crisis. Solitude I could handle, but loneliness, that frightened me. Running, I thought before I was sick, wasn’t for me.
But getting started, I suppose I was mentally tough. That is, if you want to cut to the chase, all that is required. Be smarter than me, though, and talk to you doctor, or someone with medical training, to work out a plan. Then just stick to it. Listen to your body. It won’t be easy, but nothing in this world that is worth it ever is.
Next: Getting Started: Part Two
