It’s time for us to revisit this blog’s roots. (OK, I hear the jokes from the back row about ripping it out by the roots and pouring herbicide on it.) Let’s look at a couple of life mysteries that are truly impossible to track down.
Many many years ago, Auburn University, slumping as it does in the southern liquid heat (Oxford on the Chattahoochee as my friend, the poet R.T. Smith named it), decided with a mild sadistic smile that, even though ROTC would no longer be required after the late ‘60’s, every male had to take a phys ed course during their first quarter of freshman year.
I dutifully took the course in the Fall (fall, hahaha, high summer) Quarter of my freshman year. Someone forgot to tell them that it didn’t have to be Army ROTC boot camp anymore. It was vicious. Situps, pushups, running miles, all under the unrelenting Alabama heat. My memory fails, but I suspect that we performed all of the exercises that one can perform while preparing for a life in the army. It was brutal.
Probably no one passed out, threw up, dropped to the ground with a stroke, etc., because they were all southern boys and used to plowing the north 40 with the sun on their necks. I was lucky that I had been living the last six years in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
One day, walking out of the locker room, I encountered an enormous human being named Bob “Knock ‘Em Down” Brown, a defensive tackle on the football team. He was three times my size, and this was 50 years ago. He was in his pads, and I thought, how do you live? He looked about as grim as I felt.
Finally, at the end of the quarter, we were subjected to a number of tests, only one of which I can remember anything about (it’s been a HALF CENTURY, OK? Isn’t that painful enough to consider?). It was a mile run. We all took off at once, 25 or so of us, and at the end of the mile a dull dim coach, staring at his stopwatch, called out our times as we crossed the finish line.
When I crossed it, he said, “5.37,” in his dull voice.
I stopped and the time struck me. 5.37?
This time came back to me recently, after not having considered it for probably over 30 years. I was lying on the table of the wonderful acupuncturist who tried to ease the pain from my epidural hoohaw, Bajda Welty. She’s great, a real athlete who runs and whose kid played baseball; when he quit, she was as sad as she could be. Anyway, as I was lying down on the table with pins stuck in me, for some reason the moment came back to me: I ran a 5:37 mile. Wow! That’s pretty fast. Considering how slow I am, it’s very fast.
I began to deconstruct the moment: That’s only a minute and a half shy of a four-minute mile, which is a gold standard. I could not have been so fast, even given how hard we all worked that autumn, how thin I’d become, how I’d worked myself into such good shape. I am competitive, after all, so I probably tried very hard to keep up with those Alabama farm boys.
But, as I lay on my stomach with pins including, this day, in the crown of my head, I thought, that’s impossible. Perhaps lying there in my underwear, with pins all over, I was susceptible to notions of incompetence and impending mortality. Or perhaps it was the pin in my head.
Yet I couldn’t have run a mile so quickly. When I ran on the track in Wilmington, DE, after work at AIG, I ran three ten-minutes miles. That was it. OK, I ran three miles, but at nearly twice the time I thought I’d run that infamous mile in Auburn.
What might have happened? The coach may have been such a moron that he either misread the watch. Or it’s entirely likely that he forgot and started it too late. Or maybe his accent was so thick that I misheard him—I’d been in town a couple of months, and usually I had no idea what people were saying to me.
Any of those three options is much more likely than that slow me ran a 5:37 mile.
When Bajda came in to take the needles out, I asked her what her fastest mile had been. She said, oh maybe seven and a half. And she’s tall and lean, a real runner’s body.
OK. I never ran any 5:37. I shall erase that memory from the hard drive of my mind. But how did it get there in the first place? I guess I’ll never know.
In the summer of my tragically nerdy 11th year, we moved from Morgantown, WV, to the urban jungle of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. My grandparents were moving with us. A few years earlier, they had struck camp in Mansfield, PA, their decades-long home, to join us in Morgantown, and it was only natural that they’d accompany us to Florida. They were perhaps 80, and my grandfather had a rheumatic heart and was just five years from a difficult heart attack.
As I was only 11, I have no idea how what I’m about to describe happened, especially now that I’ve had a career in law. We had bought a house on, let’s say, Anderson Avenue (memory fails), and we purchased a house around the corner on 65th Ave. for my grandparents to live in.
These were my mother’s parents: WASPy descendants of English and Dutch settlers of New York, they had never reconciled themselves to my father, a Polish Catholic. There were tensions of which I was generally unaware, unless my mother came home crying into her hands.
The moving van pulled up to my grandparents’ house and opened the back. There was a discussion to which I wasn’t privy. Suddenly the movers were unloading our stuff into the house next door, which happened to be empty.
Then they unloaded my grandparents’ stuff into their house. And they drove away.
We lived for six years at that house and never sniffed the inside of the Anderson Avenue house. How did that happen? How could it happen? Hadn’t we bought the Anderson Avenue house? And hadn’t we not bought the 65th Ave. house?
Maybe real estate law and custom was different in those days, but if we had closed on the purchase of the Anderson Avenue house, didn’t we have to live in it and make the payments on it?
And if we hadn’t bought the 65th Ave. house, how could a bunch of movers just walk onto the property, get into the house, and deposit all of our belongings there? Wouldn’t that be trespassing? How did they even get in?
Let me stress that this was all the activity of a moment. I don’t recall any realtors, bankers, or lawyers crowding onto the front porch, shoving forward papers for my parents to sign. There were no sellers in sight. Yet there we were, sleeping there that night. And about 2,000 nights more. I also don’t recall my parents discussing how we ended up in a place that we didn’t really know anything about till five minutes before we moved into it.
I’ve asked my brother about this, but he was nowhere in sight, at Indiana University at the time. My sister had begun at Goucher. They have no memory of it, nor should they be expected to, as parents usually didn’t tell even college kids the details of their real estate deals in those days. (Now, Kate insists on knowing everything that’s going on at our house and has an opinion on it too.) My parents never spoke of it, and I was too young for it to occur to me to ask about.
“Hey Dad, how did we end up in this house, anyway?” Never came up.
It’s just a mystery. There may be records in some dusty Broward County office, but probably no explanation of how someone, if anyone, pulled this off.
It’s amazing how many things happen in your life for which there is no explanation whatsoever.
PS: The blog has changed how you add captions to photos, and I'm flummoxed. Why oh why can't they just leave shit alone? Anyway, the house pictured below is on 65th Ave., but it wasn't ours. It looks like it, though. I can't recall the actual address, and not every house in that area is pictured on Google Maps. Close enough.
Opmerkingen