Fateful Return

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.