Biscayne

Yesterday I rolled down to the lighthouse at Key Biscayne with my oldest friend. Gene and I met in the fall of third grade. We were both new kids in the third grade at St. Matthias grade school and in the early fall, during one of the neighborhood pickup games in the field at the nearby public school field, we argued about a ball hit over the fence into a neighbor's yard. Gene was pitching and had the ball and I got a fastball in my back as I turned away. From the ensuing fight all I remember is the Pittsburgh Steelers hat Gene wore. Soon we were fast friends.

We talk and reminisce a bit. He turns me on to some of his new music. Twenty five years ago were listening to Floyd and Zepplin. 'Chris, have you heard this one?' and now he shares a song from Passenger that speaks to me.

The last time I spent more than an evening or a day with him was a trip we took to the Smokey Mountains before I went off to the Peace Corps. We piled our backpacks and food into a friend's Duster and froze our tushies off during the rain and snow of a cold January in Tennessee. A disaster of a trip. John, a weight lifter and general tough guy, was reduced to shivering in his sleeping bag for an entire day, refusing to continue. And here's the part where I wonder at the synchronicity in the world.

There is a Tesla dealership in the Lincoln Mall in South Beach. Tesla's are very cool cars but a couple of hours of wandering through shops left me feeling like every place was a Minnesota Fabrics store. I found a stool to sit on and an older woman asked if she could share the table.

'Indiana?'
She smiles and says, 'Yes, how did you know?'
'North of Indianapolis?' and here I didn't use sociolinguistics, but made a leap back across two and a half decades to the night Gene and John and I were driving back from Tennessee, 'I would bet Lebanon, Indiana.'
She looks at me and I know I'm right. I told her the story of the first time I was in a car that broke down in Lebanon on a section of road that the state troopers never patrolled and about the Lebanon Hotel.

We didn't have enough money and no credit card for the Holiday Inn that glowed in the distance off of the interstate, so we walked from the car to the old motel. The room smelled of trucker sweat and John found a dead mouse under the bed. Gene and John walked out to a local bar and didn't get beat up. I slept in a dry place for the first time in a week. Three months later, while my friend Sean was driving my VW van, he punched me awake in the passenger seat.
'Chris, wake up, the van's losing speed.'
'What? Where are we?'
'We just passed Indianapolis.'
'You have to be shittin' me. Are we in Lebanon?'

The woman laughed and her husband came over after looking over the new S models. They were both retired and we chatted about engineering and nursing a bit before they went off to their hotel on 5th Street. Gene had his fill of horsepower and acceleration and we wandered over to the art museum across the street. A friend from Dubuque texted.
'Chris, check out the Tesla dealership in the Lincoln Mall.'

Check that. And I will see you all in Lebanon.

miami beach

I first rode my bicycle in Florida about eight years ago. I was attending a conference in Tampa, renting a room in St. Pete's and rode with a local group called the Mad Dogs. I met a former Olympian from 1932 who was able to hang in the rocking chair of the A group. He was 92 and loved talking about his tomatoes and was a true ancien coureur. The other stand out memory was the A ride itself. We averaged 27 mph down to the state park at the tip of the peninsula and back and often cruised at 30+. It was completely flat. There were about seven or eight of us on the front participating in the pace line and another thirty or so sitting in the rocking chair, it was a big chair, being whisked along in the draft.

When you ride in a group, the idea is to maintain the effort, the pressure on the pedals until you are the one on the front, then the idea is keep a constant speed that the group can tolerate. This forces the lead to work harder and, after a number of turns on the crank, to pull off and rest in the back of the pace line. That morning, has we headed south, our safety against the blue-haired drivers aided by our numbers, we would hit causeways where the road would rise to cross the water. In Iowa, this would be considered a small roller, a tiny hill that wouldn't require even a downshift, just a muscle-through. In Florida, because of the relentlessly flat terrain, those causeways caused a dramatic reaction in the group. The first time we hit one, I was on the front, feeling good and excited to be in the paceline. I powered over the bridge and, at the top, signaled with my elbow to let the next guy come through. There wasn't one. Muscling through the small climb had dropped the group and they were about twenty yards behind me.

I was embarrassed. Dropping the group was a huge faux pas in riding culture. In Europe it might get you uninvited to the next group ride. I apologized as I soft pedaled back through the group and was very aware when the next rise came up. Again, the group downshifted, riders started breathing hard and everyone slowed. I did the same and marveled at the feeling of being a better climber than the others. Me, the too-large oaf who would get dropped on climbs in Iowa and France, was like a visitor from Krypton here. I didn't let it get to my head.

So yesterday, eight years later, I rode north in Miami Beach, past hotels, the strip I wandered with an old friend the night before. Palm trees, passing views of the ocean on my right and then the intercoastal canal on my left. Somewhere past thirtieth street I noticed the Jewish influences more and the trendy seediness of the South Beach area was behind me. Then island narrowed and the road tilted up into a causeway. I smiled and remembered my ride in St. Petes and then considered what an apt metaphor this was about life.

I turned at the Welcome to Sunny Isles sign and rode back to the condo on the other side of the island, spinning circular metaphors the whole way.

suspending disbelief

The holidays are sometimes like a river gauge, that calibrated stick jammed into the river bottom, or sketched onto the piling of a bridge. Folks used to floating down river see them on a regular basis in the course of a day's float and they often back up the sense data of the paddle hitting the bottom when the river's shallower then normal, or give reason to that more-excited-than-usual feeling in that last rapid that was kind of boring last time. If one looked at the river more often than a weekly or monthly paddle, the changes might not be noticeable.

Relatives are my river gauges.

There are new jobs, new relationships, 'big news', and the like that often must be sketched out during the early parts of the holiday get together. People have heard things, things have happened, things need to be shared in order to re-invigorate the relationship. This is repeated over and over, sometimes over a glass of wine or beer, then over the weenie winks and artichoke dip, then over dinner and the following slice of pie, then over coffee. Sometimes this comprises the totality of the sharing; everyone is getting up to speed until then next gathering. But I've been lucky with different sides of my family, to have a spaces when real sharing happens, that connection that cements deeper friendship when one realizes that this is someone that I'd choose to befriend even without a blood tie. As one of my Colorado teammates would say about us, 'brothas from anotha motha.'

Last night my nephew Alex gave a Tarot card reading to my son Karl. These things happen at family get-togethers. Later, after the pie, Alex and I were talking.

'So, what do you believe happens when Karl picks the cards from the deck?'
'Well, the Karl's intention affects which card he chooses.'
'Something magical happens?'
'Yes.'

We go on to talk about the importance of the narrative created by the two people, but Alex takes it a step further and says there is an actual affect on the cards by Karl's energy.

'Why do you think that?'
'Because I've seen it different times; I've done thousands of readings and sometimes the other person doesn't like the card and we do it again. You know what? They will draw that same card again. It's happened like five times. They'll pull it two or three times in a row out of a deck of 70 cards. What are the odds of that?'
'Has it happened that a person didn't draw the same card again?'
'Sure.'
'How many times has that happened?'

My surface role is skeptical uncle, but I'm more interested in an idea that is simmering just below the surface that might connect Alex and I instead of leaving both of us in our stereotypical roles.

'What if the important thing isn't whether a belief is true or not? What if the important thing is that there are two people building a narrative together of their perception of what's important in their lives?'

And this is what we talked about the rest of the evening together until the party ended with his dad's fireworks outside. This is what I thought about on the drive home and what I left off with as I fell asleep. It's easy to be critical of magical thinking, whether it's in a deck of Tarot cards or in an elaborate presentation of a mass or rabbinical service or (put your favorite belief here). However, like erotic love in Plato's Symposium or my sister-in-law's holiday party, it is a conversation starter; it can set the table.

For what... for maybe the less amazing and more magical things in our lives, the rivers rising and falling imperceptibly: the magic of drawing a quiet breath, the silence of the night air cushioned by snow under the cedars outside the house, the simple awareness of it. The feeling of flow when I ride a bicycle, air, sweat, breath, pain, joy, seeing over a hill, noticing a detail, these are miracles of being. Alex's soon to be brother-in-law had joined us and participated in the dialogue. Alex's mother came by, uncomfortable, I think, with the earnestness in our voices. 'Mom, I get to talk with my uncle once a year; let us be!'

Later, just before the fireworks, I heard his father say to his soon-to-be-son-in-law, 'Chris is the only liberal that doesn't get angry with me when we talk politics. I love that about him.'

And that makes the party, the over indulgence in sweets and meats, so worth it.