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.

​

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

​

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.

​

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

​

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.

​

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

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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

​

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.

​

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

​

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.

​

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.

​

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

​

“Chicken dentist …. “

​

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

​

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.

​

“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.”

​

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.

​

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.

​

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

​

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

​

But I digress.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.”

​

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.

​

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.

​

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

​

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.

​

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.  

​

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

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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

​

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.

​

“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.”

​

Three dots appear before there is more:

​

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.”

​

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.

​

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.

​

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

​

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

​

“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.