The stories of our demise are greatly dimished

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“I could have lived forever …”  my mother used to say. It would be her standard response whenever I had divulged some morsel of information that, to her, seemed over the top: Something excessive, extravagant, outside of norms … or something entirely too personal.

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Not that she was squeamish. She was keen to see all skinned knees, infected cuts, or random swelling that seemed to come out of nowhere.

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But gossip, or taking some unnecessary risk, as she thought of it – especially if it was delivered in the form of news and information – she felt better off just not knowing.

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I knew her better, though.

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Her mind thirsted for information she could parse.

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Her mind could sift truth from fiction as efficiently as she could discern her daughter’s true intentions from her insistence I had none.

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I think of the sparkle in her eye and her mischievous half-grin whenever I open my computer to the news of the day.

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My inbox is filled with stories about health and wellness; each one extolling the virtues of what I try to assume, when forwarded by friends and loved ones, these are well-meant suggestions sealed with love and, often, care-animated emojis.

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Sometimes they include links to lengthy articles written in a scholarly style that purport some recent finding extrapolated from science and translated into easily digestible prose.  

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Often their messages conflict.

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Why, just this week, I gleaned through missives that trumpeted THE key to longevity as not only being busy and feeling useful as we age, but also remaining optimistic, or more pointedly, resilient.

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Of course, it sounds good. It sounds like something we should know intuitively. Like common sense, or the proverbial sense God gave goats, but just a few clicks away into the archives of “like-minded articles,” I am confronted with the polar opposite.

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Here are the stories that warn against my desire to drink coffee, or confirm my bias against red wine. Here are the stories that make the case for doing nothing at all. Here are the choice parts of studies that tell not to do what today’s studies are tentatively debunking … in mice.

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My mother always hated these stories the most.

In her mind, these harmless little stories that asked a centenarian to provide the key to their longevity and hearing that it was knocking back a whiskey once a day, or never going to bed angry, or exercising obsessively, or not at all … after all how many studies show how many people visit emergency rooms each year as a result of an accident when they were exercising?!!

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The only thing we know for sure is that we humans don’t live forever. We can do all the right things, and we still might not get to live long enough.

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I knew she was right … but I also knew that keeping busy helped settle anxieties. The occasional glass of wine gave her pleasure, of course, but not nearly as much pleasure as she gleaned from debunking the myths “experts” kept trying to pass off as incontrovertible truth.

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I half-smile as I close the newspaper story, knowing I will not live forever, but I will probably live to see today’s revelations debunked.

Found, in translation

 I slipped the keycard into a pocket and left the hotel just after sunrise. I was groggy, having slept fitfully. I was intent on clocking an easy run through a narrow park we’d strolled past the night before, and I’d spent the majority of the evening retracing the steps we had taken back from dinner.

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Amsterdam is a beautiful city with its tall, narrow buildings, some of them leaning gently over boat-lined canals.

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It looked different in the morning. Red lights surprised me. And I hadn’t noticed the confetti of cigarette ends, until I witnessed shopkeepers sweeping them into grates and the end of the sidewalks.

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The plantings looked a little wild and untended but also fierce and fine.

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Perfectly matching the blur of this morning commute. A young woman with a messy bun and a tailored coat sits tall on her bike as she glides quickly through an intersection and joins the flow of traffic. She is followed by a boy, then a girl; a mother with a child in cargo; a man with a briefcase; an older woman with flowers; two friends holding hands.

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It was mostly quiet except for the occasional ting-ting of a bell.

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The sun was intent on cracking into my skull as I made my way to Vondelpark, a 47 hectare- (about 116 acres) urban oasis with nearly three-miles of soft and hard track meaning through lush scenery.

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The crocuses and daffodils had already made their debut. The early blossoms seemed like a gift to us, having practically shoveled our way out of the driveway a fortnight ago just to get to the airport.

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Honestly, I was surprised but delighted to see the gate at only the five-minute mark on my journey. Perhaps all roads heading west would have led me there eventually.

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I needn’t have worried myself awake, imagining myself a sprung spring in the Amsterdam clockwork … irritating the local folks just trying to get in their workouts, or taking in the fresh air of the new season as they make their way to school and work. And me - the stranger - destined to get in the way.

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Because the flow of the city was apparent from just watching it move around me. I couldn’t even miss the gaps where I should aim to fit into its current.

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On the street, the bikes rode on smooth, red lanes while pedestrians ambled down textured pavers. Where crossings happened, the peddlers slowed and the amblers sped up to accommodate each other. At intersections, each pack waited patiently for their symbols to turn green.

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Bikes crossed where there were arrows painted on the asphalt and walkers crossed where there were parallel stripes.

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In the park, the rules seemed to widen. Runners and bikers shared the main road; bikers stayed centered, navigating smoothly around runners who clung to the edges. Walkers, some with dogs on leashes, and one with a cat, kept to the pebbled pathways and grassy fields.

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Together, we moved clockwise and counterclockwise around the park. The birds singing, bells chiming, the scent of blossoms in the air.

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Before I knew it, and without ever stopping to take a single picture, I had connected my loop. I briefly considered making another circle before admitting there wouldn’t be time. I would still need to fit in a shower and breakfast before trekking out to the museum queue for our advance-ticketed time slot.

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I still have miles to go before I sleep.

The Art of Confusion

 The captain’s soothing voice came over the public address system. He’d already broken through the calming lull of the free entertainment portion of our travels — which, for me, meant a newly released movie in which I’d been delightedly engrossed — several times to apologize for the minor turbulence the cabin had been experiencing.

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I’d expected another update on the gentle bumps he charmingly begged for our pardon. …

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“Chicken dentist …. “

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I accepted the strange announcement with barely a blink. Must have heard it wrong.

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This trip had already gotten off to a weird start when two burly men showed up at the airport restaurant we’d chosen to wait out our early arrival, looked at my husband, and said my name.

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“Not to worry, ma’am, we need to sort out some things back at security, it seems there’s been a bit of a switcheroo. You’ll come right back.”

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Turns out my husband had handed me the wrong laptop as we collected the things arriving in bins fresh from the X-ray machine after we’d cleared security.

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I followed them back to the “scene of the crime,” my husband would later joke, to collect the correct computer and extend my sincerest apologies to the rightful owner of the one in my possession.

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And as promised, I returned in short order to my “short order” that carried a very long price tag.

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Not that I would complain … at least not with the panache nor effrontery of the former great, David Brooks.

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But I digress.

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I find the minor headaches and hardships of travel to be the things I come to love most, no matter how much I angst ahead of time about their probabilities.

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Eventually, we would buy the wrong train ticket and have to pay a fine, suffering more from the stern admonition for not having checked the itinerary more thoroughly than from the extra charge tacked on.

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We would ask for something potentially obscene because we had learned absolutely nothing from our efforts with the train billets kiosks that we could apply to translation apps, besides the silly notion that “it would be different this time.”

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Of course, one of us — not saying who — would forget where he’d hidden his passport just as we reached a surprise border checkpoint midway through a tram ride.

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And another of us would pack her bags like she packs a dishwasher: half as many tops and twice as many bottoms. Nothing matches or even makes sense.

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Neither of us would be able to find our way back to the hotel on the first try.

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My husband, poor guy, isn’t used to feeling turned around. He seemed to suffer a disorienting amount of navigational error made under the apparent duress of being jet-laggy in an unfamiliar place.

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For once, I wasn’t worried. As he glared at his map, I took in the sight of people all around us, settling into the river’s terraced edge. As the sun lowered, they toasted each other and the end of another workday with cans of ale they retrieved from their convenience-store bags.  

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I convinced him to have a grocery-shopped picnic by the water.

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There would be time enough to find our hotel. We might even find the secrets of happiness as we nosh on soft cheese and take sips of hard cider. I hope it has something to do with Chicken Dentists.

International incidents

I woke up as if by premonition.

Four A.M.

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The room was dark and soundless except for the steady blinking clockface of an unset video player and the buzz-saw of my husband’s snoring.

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Because I was awake, I checked my phone for changes since the last time I let myself distractedly doom scroll …  sometime before turning in for the night and actually falling asleep. Of course, there was news and emails I could ignore, but there was also a text message from my daughter who was traveling for spring break.

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At first, I was a little nervous. Not about the hour (she was in a different time zone, afterall) but about the volume. Although I hadn’t read any of them yet, there seemed to be too many words to be a “happy” communique.

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But I took a breath and began digesting, immediately understanding from the first sentence that she was miserable, and enjoying it.

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As I continued thumbing through the missive, she ranted in glorious detail about the hardships of traveling – the confusion of not being able to find your hotel lobby because it looks like a fancy cafe; or missing one train, and then another, and finding out you’ve gotten on the wrong one anyway. She tucks expletives between every third word describing how she had gone from a flawless experience during her arrival to a disaster spiral upon departure.

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“Ok, perfect. Great. Wonderful! Like ha-ha, everyone else here knows what they are doing. But the terminal is not the terminal, and the stop is not the stop. There are no train numbers, and nothing makes sense to me. … and a lady with a fancy scarf is asking me why I’m looking at the app instead of the board … which doesn’t look like a board at all. So now I am forced to hate EVERYONE because it appears I might have to live here now.”

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Three dots appear before there is more:

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She recounts that she and her traveling companion woke up later than they had planned to and missed breakfast. Then, the first tourist destination they arrived at was unexpectedly closed. They selected a familiar coffee chain to get a quick infusion of caffeine, but forgot to place the order “To Go.”

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So they sat at a table with glassware and tried to “cannonball” iced teas.

They stopped in shops and bought presents. She includes photos of a set of pottery bowls she’s bringing back.

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I can picture her flailing her arms and spinning on her heel once or twice as she exhales her tension in the torrent of contrary words. She is having a blast.

I am smiling in the dark and wondering if I should nudge my husband to share his morsel of news from abroad.

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Instead, I press her last word bubble until the phone lets me respond with a “Ha ha” emoji.

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Her immediate response makes me laugh harder: “What the heck!? Why aren’t you in bed?”

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“Motherly instinct, perhaps: I had to make sure you were having a blast and not causing an international incident. I can go back to sleep now.” 

Legend among us

 If you are an amateur runner like me you’ve probably heard of John Franks Galloway, who died this week at the age of 80 following complications from a stroke.

Better known as “Jeff,”  he was an inspiration to generations of runners and a democratizing force within the field of competition.

He was himself an elite runner. An All-American collegiate athlete and a 1972 US Olympic Team member who competed in the 10,000 meters.

In high school, Galloway recorded bests of 4:28 in the mile and 9:48 in the two-mile, becoming Georgia State Champion in the latter event.

Running for Wesleyan University, he developed as a competitor, earning All-American honors in track and cross-country, clocking 4:12 in the mile. He was on the 1966 Wesleyan cross-country team along with Amby Burfoot and later Bill Rodgers.

In 1970, Galloway became the first winner of the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta, Georgia, a race he directed for many years.

But it was perhaps his mid-70s training alteration — emphasizing more rest and fewer miles per week, coupled with a long run every other week — that made him a legend. It was a strategy that proved successful in extending his competitive career through his 70s and would have likely kept him running marathons well into his 80s. And it was a method that could be replicated by amateurs and newcomers to long-distance running.

The Galloway method consists of short bursts of running paired with planned intervals of walking – sometimes as little as 30 seconds of running paired with 30 seconds of walking for the entire duration of the race. The method reduces fatigue, boosts endurance, and prevents injury.

Not only did Galloway’s method encourage casual runners, it also proved that competitive athletes could preserve their health without compromising their overall pace. Not to mention that it helped all athletes preserve their ability to run even at advanced ages.

The Galloway Method gave us back-of-the-packers an elegant and trusted way to make it to the finish line, and it also gave us the steel we sometimes needed to feel like “real athletes.”

Walking wasn’t a weakness; it was a measurable strength.

We Galloway aficionados know from the miles of history contained in our GPS watches that we often come in close to our no-walk averages and sometimes beat our personal bests on race day when we take walk breaks.

With Galloway’s coaching, we didn’t have to defend ourselves with any of the few loud-mouthed braggards we might overhear professing that “real runners don’t walk.” We didn’t even feel bad.

When I spoke to some of my friends about the news of Galloway’s life and influence, so many of them credited him with keeping them in the race for the long haul.

We had made a choice to run in a way that supported our future as runners.

And not only did that feel good, it felt like a secret weapon that one day they would benefit from, too.

My only sadness is that Mr. Galloway didn’t get to complete the 80th-year marathon he would have aced.

One for All

It’s not that I hate surprises, it’s just that I tend to feel better when they aren’t … you know … around.

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Surprises that so “lurk” are usually not in the form of a few dollars you may have left in a pocket before the wash, or the delight of an adult-presenting child who comes back from college on a random weekend just to bask in the refrigerator light of “home.”

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Surprises shouldn’t be skulking about in the form of some new horror interrupting our lives randomly as Breaking News.

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They shouldn’t be accompanied by a video of a shirtless Secretary of Health and Human Services swimming around a plunge pool, wearing jeans, while his workout buddy - a scraggly-haired rocker who performed a segregated half-time show in dishonor of the Super Bowl, gives the camera his middle finger.  

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Nor should there be actual footage of the person who leads the agency tasked with protecting the health and safety of the nation, bragging to a podcaster about having no fear of infectious disease because he “used to snort cocaine off toilet seats.”

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But here we are.

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Turning on our televisions, watching as paramilitary forces hide their faces as they cause chaos across the country: swarming people as they try to do their jobs, or fulfill the requirements of their requests for remaining in this land. We’ve seen anonymous forces use chemical weapons at point-blank range on people who were brutalized, pulled out of cars, tackled and shackled, sometimes in front of their children.

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We are enraged that these federal forces, often multiplied by our local police, don’t even take care to know when they are trampling on the rights of citizens.

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Human rights and due process should be for all who inhabit this land. We might forget that the Constitution does not differentiate between how people are treated under the law, whether they were born here or just visiting. Without it, no one will ever be safe, let alone free.

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At what point will we allow ourselves to imagine what could be possible if we reprioritize our needs? If we consider the alternative, what truly makes us safe does not include rounding up our neighbors and locking them away in a concentration camp.

The New York For All Act, legislation aimed at protecting immigrant communities by prohibiting state and local resources, including law enforcement and government agencies, from assisting in federal civil immigration enforcement, would be a start in the right direction toward allowing our neighbors to live as the Constitution demands, as well as ensuring our police are truly protecting and serving the community.

Bryan MacCormack, Co-Executive Director, Columbia County Sanctuary Movement, explains, “There is a long and growing list of documented collusion between New York State and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including a coordinated and grant-funded seat-belt checkpoint with the DMV, State Troopers, Albany County Sheriff’s, and Cohoes police department. Words of indignation will not prevent New York from aiding in the separation of families, deportation of our neighbors, and terrorization of our communities. Only New York for All can do that.”

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The act would not only ban the formal agreements – known as 239 (g) agreements – that enable local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration agents permanently, but it would also prohibit all state and local agencies from sharing information pertaining to civil immigration law; as well as ban information-sharing and custody transfers that funnel New Yorkers into ICE detention; and require a judicial warrant before ICE can access government information or property; and finally, create consistency so protections are uniform statewide.

“When parents are taken at traffic stops, or workers are detained because local agencies share information with ICE, it is not just a policy failure — it is a moral failure,” said Rashida Tyler, Acting Executive Director, New York State Council of Churches. “Our houses of worship see the fear in our communities. Children are afraid to go to school. Survivors hesitate to call for help. Trust in public institutions erodes. New York must not participate in a system that tears families apart. The New York for All Act offers permanent, statewide protections rooted in the simple truth that our government should serve and safeguard all New Yorkers, not act as an arm of mass deportation.”

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Justice is the underpinning of democratic freedom. We need to fix what’s broken to ensure those freedoms don’t slip away.

We shouldn’t endure any more unwanted surprises. We can’t allow it continue and remain surprised at where it leads us.

Making Plans

I often think author and activist Arundhati Roy introduced me to mortality in her novel, The God of Small Things. Since reading her haunting, poetic prose when the volume was published in 1997, I have had her words – Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age – ricocheting around in my psyche ever since.

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It follows me when I travel, even for short distances, and it causes me to be leery of making long-range plans. It reminds me to think (but not speak of) hidden prayers no better than anxious superstition.

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But we have reached that viable die-able age when I have to tell my husband to hold off on booking that pricey vacation he’s been fixating on until after I get the results of the annual mammogram.

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Now that we are well into our viable die-able years, we have to plan accordingly.

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The night before only offers a fitful sleep. Nerves, I think, wake me up, prodding me to reread the same two chapters of a book I’ve been belaboring before exhaustion reclaims my consciousness. In the morning, I will find a half-charged phone on the floor where it had flopped for the last time. The page I was reading is still alive as the screen lights up in my hand.

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I will choose my clothes as if I were fate’s bride. Something old from my daughter; something new from my son; something borrowed from my husband, something blue from someone who has gone before me.

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I pretend this works despite the time a phone rang telling me they needed more pictures … and more tests … and then scans closer together until it was all fine again a year later.

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“It WAS fine,” I think, “but it WON’T BE someday.”

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I wish I were able to tamp down such tensions. I know worry doesn’t prevent bad things from happening any more than it helps good things to flourish. It’s just anxiety sending thoughts in circles.

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I count how many traffic lights I have to stop at along the way to the appointment, but I don’t know what to make of the number.

I find a parking spot right away, which is unusual. I chose it instead of winding my way to the top of the parking structure.

When I take a seat with a receptionist, the place starts to warm in a way I am not used to. The woman informs me that we are birthday twins, although several years apart.

All of the business questions she asks after that seem more personal and pleasant. When I get up to head to a waiting room, she asks me if I have plans for OUR birthday. I tell her my husband has out-of-town business, but that he’s asked me to go with him.

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“If it’s a good place, you should go and enjoy!”

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I thank her and tell her I think I will.

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And then I think of her as I put on the robe, and sit in one waiting room to get squished, and another waiting room to get scanned. I think of her on the way home, and when I park and notice an email has arrived in my inbox, heralding test results that may not have been reviewed by any medical professionals.

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And I think of her when I get the All Clear.

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But I say a silent thanks when I finally start to make plans.