Super Bowl Blues

I detest football. In all fairness I never gave it a fair chance. When someone has attempted to explain the logistics of it, after the first mention of yards and the thought that I’d have to keep track of it, I tune out. It remains to me a bunch of grown men chasing each other trying to take a ball off each other’s hands. Heck, I watched my kids do that for years. And then, there is the throwing each other on the ground and piling on top of the one already down….that sounds like a lesson of life.

I’ve never watched a Super Bowl in my life and the closest I came to it was years ago when I was invited for some unknown reason to somebody’s house to watch it. I sat in the living room watching people scream and jump up from their seats applauding at the TV while I bored myself to death.

Out of desperation and hoping to pass the time, I started writing to my friend. In the writing that lasted two hours, I told her how much her friendship meant to me, how much I had changed for the better since I knew her and I also stated my confidence and sincere desire for us to grow old as what we were, best friends. Our children would grow together, our spouses would be friends…a fairy tale.

I am glad I wrote those feelings back then for shortly after I friendship ended. I am not sure why. Strong relationships sometimes end for the most stupid reasons or for no reason at all. There were some contributing factors, no doubt. I got married and she also became involved in a relationship that made it clear from the start there was no room for me.

I tried to stay connected, to bring back or at least remind her of what we had liked in each other hoping that after a break we could resume but our times together had lost the spark of the old days. My friend, the one I could spend 15 minutes or a whole day with, was no longer.

Gradually, we missed important events in each other’s lives and our last meetings and conversations were filled with uncomfortable pauses where before there had been so many laughs.Eventually, I stopped calling. And slowly her absence became part of my life like her presence once had been. Our season had ended.

I always knew that if she ever called, it would never be too late. But I also knew that she would never call.

I might have glorified our friendship over the years as we tend to do in the distance. But I’d rather.

A relationship that meant so much, gave me so much, should only stay in our minds as something good if at all.

I have been blessed with many other good friends since then but occasionally I remember her, my best friend. And I wonder if she still credits me with any of the good she once did.An occasional invite to a Super Bowl reminds me of that letter. And sometimes I wonder if she remembers it too.

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Beyond Repair

How many times are you going to fix that bracelet before you realize it can’t be fixed anymore? My friend said as I held the two pieces in my hand that once formed my bracelet.

I had fixed it already twice but it had broken again and in spite of the repairs it had not been the same.

As I looked at it I tried to remember what made me want it back so badly. There were many memories attached to it. It had been with me for so long that I felt it my duty to prolong its stay with me. When it was new I had loved it, it had looked great. But I remembered too how it had been lately. Its sides were no longer smooth and it had gotten on every fabric ruining many dresses. It had lost form, style. It did not look the same.“You need to stop trying to fix what can not be repaired” she insisted.

I knew what she meant. It was not only the bracelet. How many relationships I had tried to fix? my own, others. I had tried to repair marriages, other people’s friendships that were not mine. Work situations where I had tried to fix something and by doing it I had put power in the hands of the offender.

How many times I had gone to the same race, year after year, running a substandard race where the race director had no desire to improve but I kept supporting it, enabling it.

What laid underneath this urge to fix, to never accept the end? What made me want to repair and settle for a bracelet that no longer was what it once was to me? It is a personality trait, I guess.In our effort to fix everything, we remain attached to a memory, suspended in a state of mourning over what was gone.

Let the damn bracelet go.

There is something to be said for perseverance, for not giving up. But some things have a life span, the bracelet lived its time.

I looked at my hand still holding the pieces. I smiled at it. I knew it would not be repaired again. I put it away and still smiling, I tied my sneakers and went for a run. After it, I might just go looking for a new one.Some things must be put to rest.

Treasure the memories, live the present.

Losing Oneself

To live is so startling it leaves no time for anything else. – Emily Dickinson

I followed and looked for something that no longer belonged to me forgetting to live in its pursuit.

What had been mine once had been an important part of my life and it had deserved the force with which I fought to bring it back, but it was gone and although I was not ready to accept its defeat without a fight, a part of me knew that its short lived existence in my life had brought me happiness, but it was also time to realize it had ended and it had ended because there was no longer a reason for it to stay.

But the rest of my being fought with all the passion that was in me to regain and reconquer what I had thought would never leave. And it had…it had left me. My world did not have what I so much loved. My world was empty, I was empty.

I tried to fill my emptiness by holding on to a past that no longer existed and in doing so I prevented a future from materializing. I refused to create a new memory because my memories were taken. And so was my life, I had forgotten how to live.

Loving intensely should not take over one’s life. We can only give the best of who we are when we remain who we are, shaped and enhanced by those around us but not reduced by their presence and not displaced by their absence.

Passionately fighting for what I loved is not something I regret and if I had to live my life again, I would love just as intensely and I would work as hard to retain what I loved but I would hope that I’d accept loss without losing sight of who I am as I did the first time around.

Accepting loss takes dignity and reclaiming of self respect, something I had also forgotten in my pursuit. But when a loss becomes real, when there is no more to hope for, only in acceptance there can be freedom.

The memories don't have to die. They will always live even in the freedom that we choose. It is them that make the past worth it, and the future enticing.

Days Like These

On weekends, I like to start my run early so I can enjoy as many hours of the day as I can. Odd, but weekends and vacation is when I wake up the earliest.

I love to run. Running gives me peace, it offers me a place to sooth my soul. But most runs are uneventful, done to keep my fitness level or for training purposes. Today was a training run and it was also a great run.I went for an 8 mile run early enough to have the roads to myself while the city slept. Late enough to have sunshine.

When I run alone I let my mind wander. If I have my IPod, I get into the feelings that the lyrics of my music evoke in me. I look at the ground or directly in front of me. I seldom stop to “smell the flowers” (too early for flowers anyway); today I did. I noticed the birds flying low to the ground.I noticed a small waterfall; I looked behind and noticed a pond I had never seen. The sound of the water hitting the rocks was clearly audible in the silence of the road.

There was still snow pushed to the curb of the road blackened by sand and dirt, the roads were framed by the streams formed by the melting snow reminding me that everything goes back eventually to its normal state; the coldest days, the snow covered roads, it all reclaims its stability.

In the last two miles of the run, the neighborhood was awakening. Kids in their sweats and pajamas were beginning to play in their front yards. Dogs were being walked.My legs were getting tired; my pace had been faster than I needed it to be. Somehow, the tranquility of this road infused energy in my body, and peace in my soul.

Today was a great run.

The Final Days of a Runner

We ran together many years. I never knew if he was indeed faster than I. What I knew is that he couldn’t just run by my side. He always had to pull ahead of me when I caught up to him; some men tend to do that when running with a female. He certainly did.

There were days when I wanted to run alone but he always found out and tagged along or he would make me feel bad for leaving him.After a while, I noticed he wasn’t that interested anymore in running with me. He took walk breaks and clearly wasn’t into it as much. I understood and stopped asking him. He didn’t seem to mind.

I did wonder if I had done something to upset him but I don’t think so. He did not seem upset just not so much into me, something had changed between us, I thought….I had been the love of his life since he met me, and he had been in my bedroom every night since that first time. I adored him too but in a different way…you see, he is Porkchop, my dog.

Except for a brief period of time when he was infatuated with another female – a friend of mine who played with him a little, he has followed me and slept by the side of my bed every night since he came to live with us 13 years ago. But lately, it is difficult for him to make it to my bedroom.

His back legs don’t support him anymore and he falls often. He looks at me with a sad look in his face; maybe he wants to tell me that he misses running with me too. We sit together, he and I, and spend a few minutes each night. I want him to know how much I love him before it’s too late. And I hope he can let me know when it is too much for him to take.

My Porkchop has been the only true canine love of my life and I will hold on to him as long as I can, even if to pay his vet bills, I’ll have to work like a dog… He deserves no less.

Sadness

Sometimes there is sadness, a quiet, long, subdued kind of sadness.

It is a different emotion than the devastating achie feeling of despair. It is a feeling that simply sits there watching the hours go by without a lingering hope of something taking it away.

That sadness does not have a drive, no urgency to it, it is drenched in conformity and resignation like hitting a wall and reaching a dead end, no way out, no place to move forward.

There are no tears in that kind of sadness, no comfort in memories. There is no anger, there are no regrets. There is emptiness that mixes with the hours.

There is sadness, there is emptiness.

Aging Gracefully

I am not as young as I used to be; I know that. I doesn’t bother me either that I don’t look the way I used to when I was 17…But it seems that orthopedic doctors have nothing better to say than remind one of our aging process.

The Sports Medicine physician I am seeing tells me as if discovering the cause of my ailments“You can’t expect to beat up your body at your age and not have any problems…”And to add insult to injury he adds:

“You should try walking; people go to the mall in the mornings and walk…” I should remind him that I don’t’ have my seniors card yet but I bite my tongue instead. His reimbursement would be lower if Medicare was paying my bill. I don’t think he would like that.

The man has no mercy, “I treat athletes all the time. But when it comes to people like you and me, we have to take it easy”….wait a minute now “you and me????” this man is bald, wrinkled and chubby…you and me? He must be at least….a year or two older than I am.

Then, I naively ask my daughter about Facebook. I am getting a lot of invitations from people to be added to their Facebook, what do I do with that? I ask. Without even pausing to think she replies with a question“Old people have Facebook???”

So I still don’t know what to do with Facebook…Nothing I can do about this inevitable aging process, but it beats the alternative and that is good enough for me.

As for my doctor, he recommended that I cross train (in the mall) a few days a week and run only a couple of times a week, that should eliminate my injuries…He might be right but for now, I think I’ll log on Marathonguide.com and find a marathon. I miss training and those 50 mile weeks, might be just what I need…

That is something I couldn’t do at 17…