This Memorial Day I find myself at Greer
Stadium where I’ve come as a volunteer to help the Nashville Striders hold
their Memorial Day Dash 5K, as I did on this holiday last year. The race starts
here and then ends in the Nashville City Cemetery.
Last year I remember talking with
Joe Dunkin here. We exchanged news about ultrarunner Angela Ivory. At the
finish line area, I saw Congressman Jim Cooper, who’d run the 5K himself. After
my job was completed that day, I drove to Shelby Park and made a twelve-mile
training run.
Once the race has started, my job today
is to help disassemble and stow the starting line equipment, scaffolding,
fences, and so forth. Then we’ll go to the finish line down in the cemetery and
after the last runner has finished, we’ll do the same at the finish line. “Teardown,”
the Striders call my assignment for today.
This race meanders through a good
portion of the cemetery. It occurs to me that some might view running in a
cemetery as disrespectful. The Striders disagree. I do, too. The sport of
running exists at the intersection of good health, friendship, charity and even
love. We honor the fallen heroes when we bring these qualities to their resting
place. Demonstration of our life-affirming behavior honors the fallen more than
any solemn speech from a politician.
It was there in the cemetery last
year that I saw Congressman Jim Cooper. After the race he was talking with
another runner, probably a constituent of his. Living outside his district, I
didn’t interrupt to talk with him myself. I had no need to. Now I do.
Not a year would pass before he
would propose voting as a constitutional right, a 28th Amendment to the
Constitution, and argue its need in a speech which I later read. The speech is
poignant, personal and powerful. It ranks among the best documents I’ve ever
read. If I see him today, I want to tell him what runners always say: “good
job.”
He tells the personal story of his
father, a three time governor of Tennessee, who, he claims, would be a racist
by today’s standards. Yet, “like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird,” he had once defended a black man accused
of raping a white woman. A lynch mob burned the Shelbyville courthouse down and
killed two bystanders. The Congressman’s father, Prentice Cooper, narrowly
escaped with his life.
He further talks about how
Tennessean Wilma Rudolph could go to the 1960 Rome Olympics, where she won
three gold medals, and yet could not have lunch at a Nashville lunch counter,
or ride a Greyhound bus, or go to the women’s restroom, and other indignities.
Here at home, the fastest woman in the world was not accorded the full rights
of citizenship.
He talks about John Lewis, the civil
rights leader and U.S. Representative from Georgia, who, like Rudolph, attended
college in Nashville. Only recently, while attending the second inauguration of
the nation’s first black president, Lewis stoically ignored “birther” jokes from
opposing congressional colleagues, during the very ceremony itself.
All citizens deserve the rights of
citizenship. The heroes we honor today fought for that principle. Though much
has improved, the struggle continues. By various strategies, the vote was
historically denied people of color. A constitutional right to vote would guarantee
that no adult citizen’s right to vote
could be infringed.
As a person of color, Angela Ivory, would
agree, I’m sure. In her relations with friends like Joe Dunkin and me she’d
always seemed apolitical. Perhaps that was a defense mechanism. She’d been a quiet
leader, earning BS and MS degrees in engineering from Vanderbilt, in a day when
women, let alone black women, were a small minority in engineering.
Answering a question, she once
confided to me that she suffered insults in her life because of her race. Hard
to accept that such a sweet unassuming person could be the target of racists.
But I know it must be true.
Though she was apolitical, I once talked
her into attending a protest. We listened to some rousing speeches and marched downtown
with the Occupy Nashville movement. Later we sat on a bench at the courthouse
resting and then walked across the Woodland Street Bridge, a structure we’d
both run across many times, to the Gerst Haus. There we occupied a table.
I ordered bratwurst, sauer kraut and
pumpernickel, a meal I had there again only three nights ago remembering Angela.
I tried to help her select some items that met her vegetarian regimen. She
rejected beans, pointing out that “they are usually seasoned with meat.” Her
self discipline was without flaws. It was the discipline that enabled her to
run a marathon in every state, which she did twice, and to run an ultramarathon
in each state. A handful of states remained in that last task when her time ran
out.
Angela and I frequently attended
concerts at Schermerhorn Symphony Center. We’d meet for dinner before the concert.
As a practice, I bought season tickets to the jazz concert series, but we
attended pop and classical shows as well.
One time we went to Sole Mio, a
white tablecloth restaurant near Schermerhorn. Angela preferred pasta and I
thought she’d like the selection there. The dinner preceded a classical
concert. We agreed to dress up for that. Angela wore a black dress, smooth and
long. It was wintertime, and when she entered she had on a black coat and
beret-like hat, both of which she left hanging in the lobby.
Accustomed to seeing her in running
clothes, I expect few of Angela’s friends ever saw her the way she looked that
night—strikingly elegant in her black dress. Her head was bald as a billiard
from cancer treatments. It didn’t detract, but lent a vaguely exotic look. Angela
laughed about it, not the least embarrassed. I was glad. We sat at a table for
two. The waiter wore a white apron and a thin mustache.
I suppose he wondered why the young bald
black woman was dining with the old white man. He could invent all sorts of
reasons without ever guessing the simply truth: Which was that we were simply friends,
that our friendship spanned a chasm of race, age and culture like a bridge,
that we were after all two people much alike – alike in temperament, in running,
even in engineering training. That we had much more in common than in
difference. That we were friends.
It is by the spirit of such
friendship that the runners today honor the fallen in running through Nashville
City Cemetery. I’m here to remember Angela.
Because, in the end, it would happen
that we were different in a way neither of us could overcome: Angela had cancer
and I did not. That difference finally separated us.
A friend of Angela’s, too, Joe
Dunkin is an old runner like me. Rather than run he mostly walks now, following
some heart trouble. He was the one who told me here last year that Angela was “in
her last days.” He knew someone who worked with her. Incredibly, she was still
going to work, but Thursday was to be her last day, he said.
After the race last year, on my way
to Shelby Park, I gave Joe a lift and dropped him off on the eastside about a
block south of the Woodland Street Bridge, near the Titans’ stadium. I can’t
remember why he wanted to get out at that particular place. As I drove away he
seemed to look around a little uncertain himself.
After I’d finished my run in Shelby Park,
I gave Angela a call. I thought we could get together for lunch, or just visit.
It had been in my plans all along, but I wanted to surprise her.
The phone rang and rang. There was
no answer. That wasn’t too unusual. She lived alone in a house she owned, and she
did the yard work herself. I then tried her cell phone, but there was no answer
on it either. I waited a while before leaving the park, and tried both phones
again, several times. Still, no answer.
From that day on, no one ever saw
Angela again. Her sister Nicole from Memphis had visited with her on the
previous day. She was trying to call Angela, too. Finally, on Thursday, the day
which was to be Angela’s last day at work, police were alerted. They found
Angela lying dead in the floor of her house.
I’d last seen her four weeks
earlier, when I came to town for the Country Music packet pickup. We’d had lunch
at the Old Spaghetti Factory. She felt good that day, although I could see that
her eyes were slightly yellowed from her ailing liver. She had a good appetite
and we laughed a lot. Later we walked up Commerce Street to Fourth Avenue,
where we had to part. We hugged. “Good luck, precious lady. Take care,” I told
her. I watched her walk up Fourth toward the L&C tower, where her office
was. It was the last time I would see her.
Angela died alone. Even as we were
trying to call her, she died alone. That fact struck me as infinitely sad. Then
I realized a contrary fact: she died like she’d lived, asking no one’s strength
but her own. She didn’t die in a hospital connected to tubes. She didn’t even
die in bed. They found her in the floor. She died on her feet. And that was the
way the extreme marathoner had lived. The manner of her death evinces the
extraordinary strength she’d shown throughout her life. It was the last terrible
expression of her iron will.
She finished the race the way she’d
run it. Today, Memorial Day, one year later, that thought buoys and encourages
me.
Today I have another duty—to visit
with Joe Dunkin. Four weeks ago when he was running the Country Music Half Marathon,
he fell near mile 12 a bit before he reached the Woodland Street Bridge. He
struck his head in such a way that it damaged his spinal cord and he had to
have emergency surgery on his neck. Now he is in Vanderbilt Stallworth
Rehabilitation Hospital learning to walk again. I won’t have to search for that
building. It’s the place were my mother was taken following her stroke, fifteen
years ago.
Memorial Day, one year since Angela’s
passing—Joe and I together will remember her. And to Joe I want to say, good
luck, man, and take care.
