Annual Christmas night run

During my annual Christmas night run I decided to spend my 90 minutes touring my old playgrounds.  The following is a list of the most memorable spots along the way:

Rolling Hills Swim and Tennis Club: where I spent most of my summers training, competing, sunning, boy watching, flipping burgers and eating Wednesday morning post practice eating donuts

The home of BH: the first boy I ever “slow danced” with (mummy danced more like it)

C’s family’s new home

Fairfield Aquatic Center: where I life-guarded one summer

1866 Doral Drive: our old house, I actually walked around the the backyard to see how different it had changed….no herb garden, no metal swing set, and the place where the dog and I had made our hand/paw prints in the curb had been replaced with new cement.

C’s next door house where I spent a good deal of my childhood playing and my first overnight experience that ended in oreo cookies, milk and a walk across the yard back home because I couldn’t fall asleep.

More high school friends’ homes where I’d hung out in the Hunter Road subdivisions: R’s, S’s, L’s

Harbin Park: I ran the back part of my high school cross country course in the snow.  That brought back the freshest memories and a bundle of anxious butterflies thinking back on all the mental toughness that had been tested race after race and training after training.  I recalled the summer nature camps, birthday parties, family Sunday picnics, walks with dates, science project research with dad and my first cross country practice where I was made fun of for wearing dangling teal colored earings.

Park, Red Oak, Evalie, Pleasant, Rolling Hills roads,: I ran past house after house where I had played and tried to grow up

A’s house: team mud fight and pool parties, M’s house: talent show dance rehearsals, R’s house: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun movie and slumber parties, L’s house: her big sister’s Cyndi Lauper music and learning that a screen door is not an exit through a failed trial

South Elementary School: the biggest playground ever!, my first bee sting, worms on asphalt on warm rainy days, Mr. C dressed up as a gorilla on Right to Read Week, playing chase with the boys and girls and having our classmate with Downs protect the girls, my mom’s eclectic and creative classroom and speech pathology “closet” office, arguing my right to be a member of the safety guard

Mom playing the organ

“Do you smell something burning?” Dad asked as he paced around the living room.  We were running the 40 year old electric organ that hadn’t been used in over 5 years.  Instead of taking grandma to the midnight candle light service my parents did not want to attend (though it’s been our tradition for at least 20 years) I encouraged my mom to brush off her organ playing skills for grandma’s sake.  This meant far more to my grandma than going to the service.  My mom used to play carols on the organ every Christmas Eve while my grandma and I would stand in the wings singing (quite badly I might add) while my father videotaped and my brother busied himself in the front window dancing and/or mooning the potential cars passing by.  In between carols my grandmother would reprimand my brother for embarrassing the entire family.  In return, he spat back obscene comments, like the one I remember from one year, “Grandma, go sniff your vagina.”

It was a jolly good time.

real job

It was the annual Christmas get together with high school friends this evening.  A friend’s significant other asked about one of my jobs.  When I mentioned that I was applying for a writing position with a big advertising firm he responded, “Oh, you mean a real job?”  “And what might that be?” I asked, “A job in which I can climb the corporate ranks by kissing ass? Work 9-5 with no sense of duty to humanity?”  I got a little hot and bothered.  But I reminded myself that “real” was a matter of perspective.  What mattered most was fulfilling what I feel is real while at the same time trying to remember that understanding what is “real” is like seeking “truth”: an endless search.  Half of making something “real” is believing.  Instead of defending myself when X prodded me with the “real job” comment, I should have saved my energy and reminded myself that what I believe in and feel cannot be explained.  It’s when someone steps out of what the majority believes is real that new opportunities are created.   Thank goodness Disney took a leap.

I’m reminded of Holly Golightly.  “She’s a phony, but she’s a real phony,” OJ Bergman says of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “You know why? Because she honestly believes in all this phony junk she believes in.”

smell of pipe on a run

= Uncle Gail and his grin

wake in the pool

As I sat in my seat aboard the plane bound for Dayton, my eyes were drawn to the rock of the water in the bottle of water atop the flight attendant’s cart in the middle of the aisle.  Immediately I thought of Indonesian maintenance man,Fendi, laughing at me in my swimsuit as I walked up to aqua-jog in the bathtub sized pool aboard the Peace Boat he was draining.  “Captain’s orders,” he chuckled as I scowled in disappointment, “Ship is rocking too much.”  One of the most frustrating thing being aboard a ship for 3 months was not being able to get in the water!  The pool was tiny and only full half the time.  Surprisingly I was still drawn to water activities when we landed in ports.

Cornea Abrasion and an Eclipse

Tonight I accidentally ran into the heel of a shoe hanging on my shoe rack over my door.  Dumb ass I know.  The pain was most similar to the multiple occasions I’ve been hit in the eye with a raquetball, an event that happens every time I have walked into a raquetball court.  Another brilliant eye stabbing occurred in elementary school when I accidentally ran a pencil into, luckily, only the corner of my eye.

skins or shirts?

We’d started our run in tights, sports bras, long sleeve shirts, jackets, hats and gloves.  By the time we’d been running 45 minutes, with 45 to go, we’d stripped down to only our tights and sports bras.  Another 15 minutes went by before I suggested we run topless, “Only for 5 minutes or until we see someone coming on the trail,” I assured her.  It was Community Ditch Trail after all!  We stripped off the bra and, despite the new found pleasure in bosom freedom, we quickly realized how comfortable those stitched together pieces of fabric actually were.  There is nothing quite like your shadow when you are running naked.

I recalled streaking in college with my roommate.  Before you graduated (and some students did it a couple of times during their college career) it was a rite of passage to run around the statue called The Flame.  It was located in the middle of campus.  Seeing how we lived off campus our senior year, we decided to drive and park about 100 meters from the statue before taking off in nothing but our sneakers.  There were no shadows as it was after midnight when we made our mad dash.

I think I have always been more comfortable than most in my own skin.  I attribute it to running around a good deal of my childhood in a bathing suit.  As you can tell from the picture, I was the kid in the neighborhood who preferred to play in skins over shirts.