I’ve tried to write this blog seven times, and so I’ve given up drafting it in the text editor of my website where, for the past two weeks or so, I would draft a paragraph or two, get stuck, stop, re-read what I’d written and delete it. My virtual trashcan overfloweth with bad prose clogging up the back end of my website.
Tonight, I’m trying something new. I unplugged, and did this the old fashioned way, the way I wrote papers in college: with a white screen and a blinking cursor and the sound of silence around me. Even doing that took me back to one lonely winter break when a girl I worked with in the library at the University of Nevada, Reno asked me to housesit for her while she went back home. Back then, the entire university campus shut down for about two weeks over the winter holiday, and there I was, twenty years old and alone in this little craftsman style house on Sierra Street (one street away from Reno’s main drag, Virginia Street) staring out into the gray snow and slush sleeting through the streets that were mostly empty, save for the odd vagabond now and then.
The white house with blue trim which I called my temporary home that winter neighbored a halfway house, so maybe that was the source of some of the vagabonds out front. I was told never to use the front door, but to always enter on the back porch, which let me directly into the small, cramped kitchen in the back of the house, where I remember eating cold dinners in the dark, alone— peanut butter sandwiches and raw carrots, probably. A staple meal for me, back then.
This was the winter I “met” (because I bought their essay collections in the campus bookstore even though my account went negative from the purchases) essayists David Sedaris, Philip Lopate and Thomas Lynch who, if you were to ask the twenty-year-old me, “blew my mind” because they wrote about ordinary life, or their day-to-day lives and somehow out of that muck, they extracted truth and genius. A French class, a trip to a nudist colony, a mortuary, watching one’s spouse watch a movie starring their favorite star, even an essay about one’s own naked body— these stories inspired a hope in me that becoming a writer like that wasn’t impossible, even for someone like me.
I stared out the large picture window that looked onto the street and wrote longhand about what I saw there. Multi-page descriptions of the street, the quality of light and silence, the slowness of winter, and the way the snow mutes sound’s ability to pass through the atmosphere. I realize now I was creating a community of like-minded people, only I was the only one in the room. In the twenty years since I lived in that little house, the social circle around me narrowed as the stacks of books around me have piled high like castle ramparts, from which I can shoot words at the world to avoid the inevitable wounding of my own heart.
If you want to know the truth, my parents weren’t writers. My grandmother on mom’s side could recite poems from the 1920s verbatim—all the great and not-so-great modernists, in other words. My grandmother on my dad’s side was an artist. She worked primarily in oil paints, and so in that respect, I suppose I had models of creative women to follow. But writing wasn’t ever something I was “good” at— not as a child with the standardized testing (I still remember my stepfather made a point that I was an excellent reader— I scored in the 90th or so percentile in that. But, when it came to expressing if I understood what I wrote, I dropped down to the 80s, which meant I was unremarkable, ordinary, and possibly forgettable.)
I suppose I could point to any number of scenes that happened— I tested into the Gifted and Talented program but I was not allowed to join (the testing was probably flawed if I made it in, my parents reasoned), and I spent most of my time reading or writing stories, but none that was deemed productive. I’m not sure how to convey the simple fact that no one took me seriously as a young person—even in regards to what I wanted for myself as a college student, or what I wanted for my own life—least of all in regards to writing. I’m often accused of having little self-confidence, but in truth, I have a lot more than what I started out with. I was expected to go to college and to get a degree that would lead me into some sort of low-level office job with a steady income and guaranteed retirement. Accounting. Business. Something like that. Something practical, just North of the blue-collar world I grew up in.
But then I messed all that up and did crazy things like live in empty houses, doing my best to describe that emptiness I saw and that I felt and to find a way to connect it to some larger meaning in my life. I feel like that’s what I’m doing here, now that I’m so much older, no wiser and definitely no Sedaris, only now my writing connects me to communities like the California Coast Classic, the Silver State 508, NCNCA (for a while, at least), USA Track and Field and the other governing bodies that organized and sanctioned the sports I loved.
I started this blog wanting to write about someone else. In my last blog, I said that the California Coast Classic was all about sharing stories. And, if you haven’t been on the ride, it really is. Every night after a day of riding your bike and eating food and riding your bike more, you hear a story from someone who lives with Arthritis and how the Foundation—and the fundraising required by this event—has made their lives better. I wish I could tell you how disappointed in myself that I just can’t write that blog.
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Pete Staylor, a.k.a.: “Cap’t Pete” in the beautiful monthly newsletters he forwards to his fundraising team, has a story that reminds me something of myself. They say we react to art or writing that works as a mirror, reflecting what we believe about ourselves back to us, and this is what I did when I read his story that he forwarded to me after reading my last blog. By chance, he came across a brochure advertising the ride. It was a brief, serendipitous encounter:
Take the ride of a lifetime the brochure read, sleep out under the stars, ride your bike from San Francisco down to Los Angeles on California Highway One. Not me, no way, not in a million years. I’m too fat, too old and my knees are bad. I haven’t ridden a bike more than a couple of miles in over 10 years. Nice thought though…
I was making a car payment at the local bank and was waiting for my receipt. I laughed at the thought of actually riding down the coast of California on a bicycle. The brochure I had picked up somehow managed its way into my pocket.
When I arrived home and was pulling out the receipt for my files, there was that brochure staring up at me. The California Coast line sure is beautiful I thought. I took it into the kitchen and showed it to my wife Merry Lou. “ If that’s what you really want to do,” she stated.
It was more of a “yeah, right” as far as I was concerned. I had heard that before. I knew I was out of shape and I knew it would not be easy. I had recently undergone some new to me treatments of Synvisc for my knees. It is sort of motor oil that gets injected into the knee joints to help cushion any movement. Years of playing basketball had taken its toll and Osteoarthritis in both knees had been keeping me side lined from physical activity. One knee had been recently operated on and the Synvisc was doing its job. My knees felt better than they had felt in years. After two whole weeks of pondering this thought of riding 520 miles in 8 days I came to the conclusion that it should be done. This one was for me. Heck, I could get into shape once and for all and change my life in a positive way. Oh, and not to mention, maybe change the lives of others. This was after all a fund raising event for the Arthritis Foundation.
It was June 12th 2002 when I called the Arthritis Foundation in Los Angeles and talked with Amy Rousch (now Robertson). Amy told me all about the ride and was extremely energetic and positive addressing my concerns and level of ability or lack thereof. I came away from the conversation with her that this really was something I could accomplish. I was excited, I was scared, I was thinking to myself, “what the hell am I doing?” I signed up the next day.
That afternoon I rode my 30 pound mountain bike around the block. I’ll get used to it I thought as I returned sweaty and breathing hard after only riding less than a quarter mile.
I read that last week, and started crying. I guess I remember a world—a time—when you could just decide to do something incredible, meaningful and crazy in the moment like that. That was how I started writing—and later, running, cycling, triathloning, etc. I just decided: hey, this sounds interesting, I might not be the best at it, but let’s take some baby-steps and see how it goes.
That contrasts a lot with how I feel about the world now. I mean: I’m even afraid of the grocery store, a place I really used to love to go because I love ingredients, vegetables, spices, the way you can combine unlikely things and create a masterpiece. Pomegranate seeds, persimmon, Serrano peppers, arugula, and salmon for dinner? Why not? It helps that I live with someone who can actually cook and not get lost in an essay and burn the house down. But still: I really loved grocery shopping and now, I’m terrified of it.
I also have to admit I haven’t been riding much. I ride (mostly) indoors due to my work schedule (it turns out that the non-writer grew up to be a communications person in a marketing department for a community college, which is oddly an “essential” position these days) and certainly not enough to complete a 525-mile ride in five months.
This week, I self-diagnosed the near-debilitating pain in my leg as hamstring tendinopathy, (which is literally a pain in the ass) that will keep me from any high-intensity training, nixes running or even yoga (it turns out stretching is the worst thing to do for this kind of overuse injury.) Instead, I put hard physic-balls on the backside of my leg until the pressure brings tears to my eyes. I do hip-bridges every hour. And then, I stare out my windows at the empty world outside.
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Long ago, my fiancé was involved in a volatile divorce. At the time, we were friends— he was the person who introduced me to riding Double Centuries after a lot of personal turmoil in my own life— the miles did a lot to get me through the mess of mending. Long after his divorce was finalized, we moved in together and he mentioned that he had always wanted to own chickens. I guess I always had, too, but I’d never really thought about it— my entire focus, for my 20s and 30s has been developing myself as a writer, which meant a lot of sleeping on couches and going to graduate school— never being in any one place, and never, in a twenty-year period, having something to call “home.”
But I thought: hey, chickens sound interesting! I might not be the best at raising them, but why not? I ordered our flock online (strange, what you can order online) and four chicks arrived at the post office, chirping. One, sadly, didn’t make it, but one of those girls, a chick we named “Happy Feet” (because she looked just like that penguin in the movie of the same name) became the alpha of our flock that has, in the passing years, grown to include nine chickens.
Two weeks ago, raccoons attacked the flock and they focused on Happy Feet, who was a beautiful Partridge Cochin. By beautiful, I mean she has these patterned feathers that are brown and black that, in the sunlight, have an iridescent blue cast to them. My fiancé’s daughter gave Happy Feet her own name for her, “Emerald” due to the sheen of her feathers in the sun. (I was even contemplating showing her at a chicken show— yes, they have those and I have no idea what they are actually like— but she’s really that pretty, and yes, I’m really that weird.)
The night the attack happened we awoke to what sounded like a child screaming. Rich ran into the backyard first and our livestock guardian dog, Freya, followed him. They scared the raccoons off, but the damage was done: one of our girls lay in a heap in the middle of the chicken run. It was too dark to tell who it was until Rich picked her up. It was our alpha female: Happy Feet.
We thought she was dead. Rich carried her in the house and I grabbed a towel and we sat with her in our laps as blood ran down her face and neck, and we watched the symbol of the life we are building together, fade. She didn’t die, though. I made a bed for her out of towels inside of a cardboard box. One, ironically, has carried my books from place to place since college.
For weeks, I gave her water through an eye-dropper. She ate baby food and apple sauce. Her injures, superficial cuts across her back, seemed to be the least of our worries. One eye was closed, and it was unclear if she had already lost it, or if it was simply too swollen to open. During this awful week, she slept in her little box most of the day, but I made a point to feed her six times daily, something I’m happy to do, since I work from home. In the first week and a half since this awful thing happened, she didn’t make a single sound.
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The first piece I ever published nationally was about a pet. I was still an undergraduate student and I had taken a “nature writing” class and wrote a short piece about my tabby cat, Nermal. A part of the assignment was to submit it to some publication, and that year, it just so happened that the Chicken Soup for the Soul franchise was soliciting for their first “Pet Lover’s” edition. I remember taking the call and tossing papers (notes? An essay? No idea…) into the air like confetti as I listened to this editor tell me that my essay would be featured in the published collection. I was 22 years old.
I wrote about Nermal because she was sassy with a capital “S.” That cat learned how to manipulate my alarm clock so she could wake me up at any time of the night so I’d feed her. (And her plan worked, for a little while at least.) It was another writing project I started in my usual way: in a place where I was alone and quiet and I just started to write my experience. Like tonight.
I watch the little details of my own quiet life, the hours I spend alone. How Rich’s daughter, who named and loved Happy Feet, shies away from this chicken she once loved. I feel so powerless in this world to save even those souls who live on this little scrap of land I call home. How can I help something as large as the Arthritis Foundation? I admit, I broke down thinking about this, and my only thought remains: I wish I could—I’m trying— so hard.
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In trying to explain myself, a memory surfaced unexpectedly. I was seventeen and a senior in high school taking college classes from a local community college in Elko, Nevada, and remedial English classes because I had been an exchange student in France the year before, and the credits I took there didn’t transfer to my high school. I also worked for the local community college’s foundation office as a “student caller”— basically, a telemarketer— to help them raise funds for a new capital improvement project.
The college wanted to build a clock tower in the middle of campus, and my job was to sit in a little gray cubicle with the phone with the curly wire and call the list of names and numbers that filled 3-5 pages every night. I was a shy person, and so the task itself was monumental. If you add the fact that the price of gold had dropped and the mining industry that supported our little community had the bottom ripped out of it— well, let’s just say things got volatile.
“Just stick to the script,” the Foundation person (probably not Director, but I can’t remember who it was) would tell me every night before I sat down in that little gray cubicle of Hell. My fingers would shake as I dialed the numbers, reading the name on the page and speaking the script that described how wonderful the addition of a clock tower would be to our little campus, wondering what reality I’d be connected to on the other end of the line.
“What’s wrong with you? I can’t even afford groceries! Why do I care about a clock tower?” Was something I heard a lot in those nights of working, dialing permutations of numbers. I’d say my rehearsed lines, and then listen to the litany of reality on the other end, sometimes for hours: unemployment benefits running out, illnesses going untreated, despair, sadness, hunger, in all its versions. These lives that might have been versions of my own, that I was avoiding, too, by doing this work.
One night after a conversation with a woman whose husband was terminally ill with cancer, I hung up the phone and pressed my forehead on the desk and spent the remainder of my shift sobbing, wiping the gray desk clean when I was done.
And then there was the night when five pages of new numbers and names waited for me at that gray, sad cubicle desk. I lifted the phone and began to dial the numbers. Before I could finish the first one, I knew that I just couldn’t do it anymore. I hung up the phone. I organized the pages into a neat stack, stood up from the desk and walked out without saying a word to anyone. I never went back.
This makes me wonder: are we always defined by our failures and fears?
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Happy Feet was the kind of chicken who hated affection. She was proud, and if you picked her up, she’d try to beat you to death with her wings. A week and a half after we take her in, she’s drinking water and eating baby food. By the second week, her injured eye is open and she basically tells me: “I f***ing hate baby food.”
Battle after battle when she rotates her head away from the spoon at impossible angles, I realized: she doesn’t want to be a chicken who lives in a box and who is spoon-fed baby food six times a day. Happy Feet wants to be a chicken: she wants to peck and wander, no matter if that life is laced with danger. On Saturday, I give up playing “God” (although all I ever wanted was for her to be healthy and well again) and put her out in the backyard and let her figure it out.
I also don’t want to be a human who lives in one room and who does nothing in the world. This is the day I take the pink Freakybee bike out and do a 54-mile solo ride. Eagles fly overhead; the sky is blue and beautiful. I am neither fast or remarkable, but I’ll tell you what: I’m a person who loves riding a bike, and I got to feel that today.
So, perhaps the lesson is this: you’ve got to be what you are. Chickens want to be chickens, and people want to believe there is an opportunity to become better, to learn to grow to improve. Happy Feet taught me that: life is not living in a cardboard box. Life is not being “fed.”
Life is about doing what you are born to do, no matter what that is.
(Although, when I came home Saturday night, I unpacked the groceries, fed the dog and cats. Rich told me to go out on the back patio, that someone was there waiting for me. There she was: our proud, Alpha girl looking at the sliding glass door—perhaps at me— ready for bed. Her injured eye had opened, she had pecked for seeds and worms all day. When I walked up to her, she wanted me to pick her up, to carry her inside. She didn’t beat me to death with her wings when I did.)
Perhaps this is the time to be strong but to realize we are loved. These things are not mutually exclusive. We can create in community. Or, in community, we are meant to create.
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I remember the last California Coast Classic I rode two years ago as a guest because I was covering it for an online magazine, with the fog rolling over our bodies as we left Santa Cruz on old Hwy 1. Cap’t Pete was probably there, in the sea of riders with green and white jerseys, helping his teammates to complete the ride.
It’s a celebration of all that work and dedication to fundraising so that researchers can find a cure for an autoimmune condition that impacts 54 million Americans each and every day. That day two years ago, I was surrounded by the whirl of bicycle tires on the road and the sound of the sea over my right shoulder until the route turns inland to the territory of artichoke.
The optimism— the ride you do despite not necessarily because of. I have no idea what lies ahead of us, but here’s the deal: I’m not giving up. I’m training, I’m riding and I’m fundraising through the stories I share and tell.
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P.S.: Happy Feet has started clucking again, like a happy chicken.
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