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| Iconic feature of the race, a Hatch Show Print |
It turned out to be a fateful day, one filled with dark omens, unexpected
karma, and a ghost walking the hardwood.
Omen. I started an hour and a half before
sunrise and headed west down I-40 toward Nashville, aiming to run the Richland
Creek 5-miler. It was Saturday, April 4, 2015. The trip represented a return to
racing in Nashville for me. It had been 17 months since I’d competed there. It was a
return in another way, too. I’d run only in a limited way most of that time
while dealing with a medical ailment called Grave's Disease. The 5-miler would be my third race in two
months on my gradual return to the race circuit.
So, I headed down I-40, a drive that takes an hour and a half. And I
had familiar company. The full moon hung heavy in the west. I drove toward it. It
seemed a friendly presence. Soon, I noticed something unusual about it, a chunk of the moon had vanished on the
left side, like a bite out of a cookie. In such cases, primitive peoples
believed a monster was eating the moon. It caused them great worry.
I have no such superstitions. I recognized a lunar eclipse was
taking place. While the moon was setting in front of me and the sun was trying to
rise behind me, the earth was in the way, casting its shadow on my lunar friend.
Odd thing was, I’d heard nothing about the eclipse on social media, newspaper, radio or TV. I wondered how many of the
motorists around me knew what was happening right in front of them.
I exited the Interstate and checked an app called Google Sky Map on my smart
phone. It correctly showed the moon hovering over the western horizon, but made no
mention of the eclipse -- that I could find anyway. It was like a secret eclipse. As I drove on the waxing darkness
spread across the globe. My last glimpse of it came as I entered Nashville. Only a
sliver of the orb remained. Then I lost it in the city skyline.
Karma. The race was located at Cohn School,
once a high school, now used as an adult school. I’d passed by the building
many times, when I lived in Nashville 50 years earlier. But I’d never been in the
building or even on the grounds before. Even so, the building holds a bit of
family history, history made personal.
Although old, the building remains comfortable, pleasant, and in
good repair. I asked the gentleman manning the info desk when it was built.
“Oh, I don’t know, sometime in the 1800s,” he says, not too
precisely.
Registration was set up in the hallway on the main floor,
pre-registered pickup at one end, same-day registration at the other end. I was the first runner to arrive, and I waited while they prepare the registration table.
As it happened, bib number 314 came up for the first person in
line, which was me. Because of that, I got the particular number that could've had meaning for absolutely no one there that day but me: The number 314 equals one hundred Pi, or 100xPi. The
number exactly matched the oval bumper sticker on the back of my car, which contained the sole number 314. The number is the length in miles of the Vol State 500K road race,
which I’d completed in the summer of 2013.
“One hundred Pi” became an inside joke for that multi-day ultra.
The stress of that very esoteric adventure is likely what caused the Grave's
Disease that has made my recovery necessary in the first place. Or maybe not. The doctors don't know, neither do I. Some things in life must remain a mystery. I took the unlikely bib
outside and held it beside the sticker on my car while a young woman made a
photograph for me.
Circle Closed. Inside
the building I headed away from the registration crowd, south down a long, wide
and deserted hallway, looking for the men’s restroom. I came to double doors,
the entrance to the gym. They were locked. I retreated a few steps to a second set
of double doors, pulled on one and it opened. I walked into the deserted gym, my steps
ringing in echo on the hardwood.
I walked out to center court and stood there taking it in, turning
to look at the goals, the score board, and the collapsing bleachers pushed back
against the side wall.
The young man who would become my father ran this hardwood,
playing center position for Cohn High School. Standing there, I realized that
would’ve happened some 80 years earlier, around 1935. His history here entered family
lore, in a story you seem to have always known without thinking it was in any
way remarkable or particularly interesting. It was always just there, part
of family history.
He was kicked out of school. He got into a dispute with a
teacher and threatened to throw that person out the window. He was gifted in
intelligence and athletic ability, both. But he was also an unruly
hothead. That ended his formal education.
There is a bit of him in me. No escaping that, I reckon. Up until his death a couple decades ago he was the family patriarch. His sisters are gone, and I am the
oldest of my siblings. Which makes me a sort of family patriarch now. Thus, my visit to Cohn, in some sense, closed a circle, a circle whose orbit has taken over 80
years. And it closed solely incidental to an athletic event that I’d come to
contest, not basketball but a foot race, a race that was about to start outside the building. I had to go warm up.
Another Circle. The race course was appealing. It headed south
through an older residential area of white frame houses and into a park
containing ball fields, tennis courts, open spaces and groves of trees. The
main thing it did was cross Richland Creek. After which, we run parallel to the creek
on its west side. That took us just past the cul-de-sac of Knob Road, where
just a shot away stood the brick duplex my young family occupied 50 years earlier.
Another circle closed.
We crossed the creek again, back to the east side before turning
north for the return to Cohn School. It was at that crossing where I spotted a big
lazy pool in the creek below, a pool where you’d imagine fish live. The young
man who would become my father whose name was Glen, probably imagined it too. .because he was arrested for seining fish from a creek -- most likely this creek, I must believe, since it was near where he and his parents lived then. Another circle
closed.
More Karma. Race over and back
at Cohn School, how did it turn out? The state record for 74-year-old man was
39:57. My finish time was 38:14, hence I’d set a pending state record. I was the oldest
runner listed in the results, and my time placed me in position 57 among 307
listed finishers. It was not the best I felt I could do, but it was the best I could do
that day.. And it was encouraging. I hoped to improve in the weeks ahead as I
continued my recovery.
Standing there among the runners, I looked up at the building, its three-stories height. And I
wondered which window the teacher had feared. I wanted to have one more look. So I went inside and found the gym again. I walked out to center court and stood on the stripe. It was quiet. The scoreboard hung on the wall behind the north hoop; the U.S. flag
draped the wall below it. In 1935 when Glen Smith ran this court, the flag held
only 48 stars. I looked at the floor and at the goal. I raised my phone and snapped a
picture, then walked away.
