Country Mile

There are plenty of reasons Cindy and I decided to move to the country last year.  Tranquility, peace and quiet and starry, starry nights are just the tips of the iceberg we now call home: Senoia, Georgia. 

It’s no secret that the beautiful and scenic country roads had quite the influence on me as well.  Words can’t express how much I love running on wide open, rolling asphalt roads weaving through the pastures, woods and lakes in the still of a quiet and lazy morning in the country. 

It’s also no secret (to most, anyway) that Senoia, Georgia is also home of the hit television show The Walking Dead.   I first started running in Senoia several years ago; it was the spring of 2012, to be exact.  I had always heard how beautiful the area was and I wanted to see for myself…with one goal in mind: If it was as beautiful as I was led to believe I wanted to establish a race—The Running Dead Ultra, it would be called—that meandered through Senoia and took in many of the sites used in the production of the show. 

The first Running Dead Ultra was held on the country roads of Senoia the very next year.  The year after that Cindy and I moved there.  

The third Running Dead Ultra will be held soon.  As a way of giving back to the community, I thought it might be appropriate to spend some time picking up trash along the sides of one of the roads on which the race would be held.  I selected one of my personal favorites, Dead Oak.  Fans of The Walking Dead might recognize Dead Oak as the road many of the ‘driving-in-the-car scenes’ are filmed.  I recognize it as my absolute favorite country road to run.

Last weekend I asked my grandson if he wanted to spend some time picking up trash with me when he visited the following weekend.  He didn’t hesitate: Yes!     I wouldn’t have expected anything less from a boy who loves being at Cindy’s store (he has a knack for charming his customers; yes, his customers) and spending time with me at my ‘workhouse’ (he has a knack for eating the sweets my admin gives him).

So this fine Saturday morning I asked Krischan if he remembered what we would be doing today.  He certainly did: ‘We’re picking up trash on the side of the road.  Can we go to McDonald’s when we’re finished?’   The question you can’t say ‘no’ to, right?

So I grabbed a couple of large black plastic trash bags, Krischan grabbed his plastic knife and gun to fight any zombies we might run into and we hopped in the truck and headed over to Dead Oak Road. 

We spent the next couple of hours picking up every piece of trash we could find along a one-mile stretch of country road.  Well, actually Krischan did the picking while I held the bag.  Krischan was a real trooper, making sure he got every single beer bottle, paper cup and potato chip bag he ran across into our large black plastic bag. 

And I use the word ‘ran’ in the literal sense: If I didn’t know better I would have sworn Krischan was on an Easter egg hunt.  In his mind every piece of trash was pure gold.  He was running up embankments to get his hands on a plastic cup lid, then sliding back down on his fanny after losing his footing on the slippery pine needles.  He was throwing caution to the wind reaching into sharp, prickly vegetation to get his hands on a candy bar wrapper.  He was—after looking both ways for oncoming traffic, of course (we only saw one car all afternoon; more on that in a moment)—darting back and forth across the road, as he didn’t want to miss inspecting everything and anything that wasn’t green.

Every time we ran across two or three beer bottles or soda cans in close proximity Krischan said it looked like ‘somebody had a party here.’  I asked him who would have a party on the side of the road.  Without hesitation he replied: ‘Party dudes.’   I looked at him and asked, ‘Seriously, party dudes?’  Doubting himself and replying with more of a question than a statement, he said ‘Party poopers?’ 

This led to my explanation of what constituted a ‘litter bug’ and Krischan, never at a loss for questions asked who would do such a bad thing to nature.  I asked him what he learned in kindergarten about nature.  He replied: ‘Nature is beautiful.’    I told him he was right, but every now and then nature needed a helping hand. 

Back to that one car we saw while we were picking up trash.  An elderly woman was driving by and stopped once she came upon us.  She asked if ‘the blue truck a ways back’ was ours.  I told her it was.  She told us how much she appreciated what Krischan and I were doing.  I told her I appreciated her saying that while Krischan was busy diving into a ditch to retrieve an empty plastic gallon milk jug.  I don’t think I could have been prouder of my grandson than I was at that very moment.  As I write these words the memory of that moment still warms my heart: The pride of being a grandparent, no doubt.

Once Krischan and I secured every single piece of garbage, trash and litter we could lay our eyes and Krischan could get his hands on, we threw it all in the back of our truck and headed east on Dead Oak for our much-deserved lunch.  About two miles down the road we saw an elderly woman picking up trash that had brushed up against a fence along the side of the road.  It was the same woman who had stopped to thank us earlier.  I believe the woman lives on the horse farm the fence surrounds and that maybe picking up trash was something she does on a regular basis. 

Then again, maybe she was simply inspired by a little boy three generations her junior.  

Postscript: My friend Valerie and I ran on Dead Oak Road the very next morning.  The one-mile stretch that Krischan and I spent our Saturday afternoon removing trash was noticeably more ‘natural’ than the rest of the road.   With Krischan by my side, I hope to keep it that way.    

Eleventh Grade Entourage

All of us have had experiences like this.  The ones that aren’t funny at the time, but many years later you can look back on and laugh.  This happened when I was a junior in high school and my three best friends and I were—for lack of a better term, an entourage of sorts.  Believe me, if HBO didn’t make a ton of money on a show using the word as a title the thought would have never crossed my mind.  But since it was a comedy and since I’m looking back on it now and laughing: Yes, we were indeed an entourage.  Except none of us were rich and famous.  Or particularly easy on the eyes.  But we did make it through high school and lived to tell about it…in spite of that one night in the winter of 1972.

Before I take you with me to Neptune Beach, Florida in a time when Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together was pretty much all you could hear on your car’s AM radio, I’d like you to meet my entourage.

Rodney was the only child of our high school’s algebra teacher.  Lucky for me I always did well in her class, at least up until the semester she tried to teach us how to use a slide rule (that I believe became extinct around the time MTV debuted).  Rodney was a bright guy whose feet pointed outward at 60-degree angles when he walked (think extremely pigeon-toed, except with feet pointing in the opposite direction). Having Rodney as a friend in no way, shape or form offered me any concessions with his mother who insisted I graduate high school knowing how to use a slide rule to navigate my way around any logarithms I might encounter in the future.  (Fact: Neither happened, as I never learned to master the slide rule and I have yet to encounter a logarithm.  That is, unless a logarithm is that odd growth on the side of my left foot in which case I regret not being a little more diligent in my high school academic curriculum and will think about that very fact every time my left foot feels like it’s way too big for its shoe.) 

If our small circle of friends were based on the television show Friends, Tim would have been our ‘Joey.’   How best to describe him?  I’ll use another television show for reference: The Addams Family.  Imagine Cousin Itt with 18 inches less hair and 18 inches more height.  And a bad case of acne. Tim was the one most likely to end up in the Dean of Boy’s office after school.  Or sleeping through the black-and-white films in civics class.  Or eating nine ice cream sandwiches at lunch so he would get a bellyache and get to go home from school early.  I knew Tim all three years of high and never—NEVER met his parents.  I was in his house one time and heard his mom and dad talking in the other room.  It was like listening to the parents talking in a Charlie Brown holiday special; you know, with the ‘wah-wah-wah’ sound of a muffled trumpet in place of actual human voices.  To be honest if I had a son like Tim I might have wanted to keep a pretty low profile myself, which now that I think about it is probably the reason I never met his parents. 

Jeff was my best friend.  Jeff had three sisters, a pretty cool mom and a dad who was a professor at Jacksonville University when the basketball team made it to the final game of March Madness only to suffer a heartbreaking defeat at the hands of the great coach John Wooden’s mighty UCLA Bruins.  The Dolphins of JU were the first college basketball team to feature two seven-footers on their roster: One went on to play professional basketball and the other went on to become a policeman.  (I mention it only because Jeff and I met Pembrook Burrows, the seven-footer who wasn’t Artis Gilmore and the most famous person we met in high school other than Alice Cooper.)  Jeff, although he didn’t surf, he looked like a surfer: Tanned-with-long-blond-hair, only in Jeff’s case his tan was from playing basketball outside every day after school with his tanned-with-long-brown-hair best friend, me.  Our common love for rock and roll, playing basketball and being virtually unproductive in any way, shape or form contributed to us being the best of friends.  That and we were pretty good at using Tim as the scapegoat for most of the trouble we got into during our high school years. 

Like that one winter night back in 1972. 

Every Tuesday and Thursday night during our junior year our entourage went to the high school gym to play full-court basketball for a couple of hours.  Surprising as it may sound, we often played in pickup games against members of our varsity team and most of the time held our own…except for the nights when both of the Anthony brothers played.  Imagine two LeBron James’ playing against seventh-graders and you get an idea of what those nights were like.  Afterwards we would go to the local convenience store and get four 16-ounce Nehi Grape Sodas and have our bi-weekly belching contest.  (Belches were scored on a scale of one to 10.  For a perfect ’10 there had to be visual evidence as well as audible evidence of the belch.  No one ever scored a perfect ’10,’ but Tim came close a couple of times on the days his belches smelled an awful lot an ice cream sandwich. 

On this particular Thursday night we were drinking our Nehi’s in my parents’ Chevy Malibu (I was driving) on our way to Rodney’s house to drop him off.  That’s when we saw his two-houses-down neighbor, cute-as-a-button 10^th-grade cheerleader Becky standing in her front yard saying goodnight to her 12^th-grade boyfriend Joey.  Joey was perhaps the richest and in all probability the butt ugliest boy in the entire student body, not to mention the owner of an infinite wardrobe of white pants.  Jeff, sitting in the front passenger seat rolled his window down and began screaming at the top of his lungs for Becky to DUMP THE SCRAWNY RUG-HEAD!!! (Joe was every bit of 120 pounds with hair resembling a light brown Brillo pad.  I might add he looked like the end of a pug.  The back end.)  So a couple hundred yards later as we’re approaching Rodney’s house, Jeff asks me to turn around and head back to Becky’s house: He wasn’t finished.  As I did a quick U-turn in the middle of the road Jeff jumped in the back seat, rolled down the window and was ready to pick up where he left off from our first drive-by. Thirty seconds, seven or eight insults and a quarter of a mile later I now have to turn around one more time to drop Rodney off at his house.

And pass by Becky’s house one more time.  Believe me: This third time was no charm.

As we pass by the cheerleader’s house, you’ll never guess who came screeching out of the driveway in his convertible. 

Yep.  The scrawny rughead, in hot pursuit of our entourage. 

We passed by Rodney’s house at 65 miles per hour.  Tim tried to get Rodney to jump out the door and hit the ground rolling ‘like they do on TV’ so we wouldn’t have to come by later to drop him off.  You know, after I did my job behind the wheel and lost Joe and his convertible. 

Joe followed us for a good 25 minutes as I drove up and down every road in Neptune Beach at break-neck speeds trying to lose him.  I was doing quite well until I hit a red-light on Penman Road and Joe pulled up next to me.  (Note: Penman Road is a two-lane so yes, Joe was sitting at the red light on the wrong side of the road and facing oncoming traffic so he could be next to me.)  He looked right at me and I immediately looked to my entourage to gauge their reactions.  I had a hard time doing so, because all of them were lying on the floorboard of the car.  Cowards.  As far as Joe knew, it was mano e mano: Just me and him.  As far as he was concerned it was me—and only me insulting his size, his hair and his girl.  Joe would certainly get his revenge tomorrow: In school where he could afford to pay someone to remind the Nehi Kid it wasn’t nice to ridicule the cute cheerleader and her scrawny-but-oh-so-rich boyfriend while they were playing kissy-face in the front yard. 

I dreaded Friday morning.  Did Joey hire the Anthony brothers to teach me a lesson?  Did he line up the entire football team—the one Becky cheered for every Friday night in the fall—to throw their weight around?  Did he donate money to the Teachers’ Lounge Remodeling Fund so Rodney’s mom would remind me how much I didn’t know about slide rules?

As it turned out nothing happened.  I can’t say why for sure, but I do know I passed Joey in the hall at least twice during the day.  I also know my face pretty much looked the same as it did 12 hours before—when Joey looked directly at it from a distance of no more than 15 feet. 

The only thing unusual about this particular Friday was Tim’s shirt.  Or rather the verbiage written on a sheet of paper torn out of a spiral notebook and Scotch-taped on his back:

Joey: It was me.

I never did find out if it was Rodney or Jeff I should have thanked.

Or Tim should have murdered.    

Busting my Brackets

Since 1985, when the month of March rolls around I become ‘That Guy.’ You know, the guy:

·      Responsible for costing big business in the United States $1.7 billion in lost productivity.

·      Responsible for Americans wagering $70 million of their hard-earned money.

·      Responsible for the biggest time suck that isn’t Facebook. 

Yep, when March arrives I become the guy responsible for putting together the annual office pool for the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

Yeah, THAT guy.

‘March Madness’ is my annual Rite of Spring.  I’ve loved college basketball since I was 15 years old.  It was during the winter of 1970 on those special Saturday afternoons when LSU was playing in the SEC Game of the Week (yes, there was only one college basketball game on Saturdays back in the Stone Age).  Why the attraction to LSU?  Two words: Pete Maravich.  Greatest college basketball player EVER. (This is not up for debate until someone averages more than Maravich’s 44.2 points per game for their college career.  By the way, there was no silly three-point shot in those days.)   Back to the story…

My basketball pool is slightly different than most.  The rules are simple:

·      Select five teams in the tournament.

·      You can only pick one #1 seed (but you don’t have to pick any if you don’t want to).

·      The seeds of your five teams must add up to 16 or more.

·      Winner is determined by total victories of your five teams.

In the early days of my pool (before it was common to see a #12 seed defeat a #5 seed in the first round—1991, if you must know) the rules were slightly different.  You still selected five teams, but you couldn’t pick any #1’s.  The new rules were put in place immediately following the year that the butt-munch who always picked the four #2 seeds and a random #3 seed finally won the pool.  

What’s interesting to me is that every year—without fail—when people turn their selections in to me for the office pool they look at my face to see my reaction.  It’s like they think I know something they don’t.

Here’s what I DO know: I picked #3 seed Illinois in 1987 as one of my five teams.  They played #14 seed Austin Peay in the first round.  They literally played the first game of the tournament in a game that Dick Vitale said before the opening tip that he would ‘stand on his head’ if Illinois lost.  Final score: Austin Peay – 68, Illinois – 67.  Not only did I lose one of my five teams in the very first game played in the tournament, I was also mathematically eliminated from winning the office pool as someone else in the pool had selected Austin Peay…and his four other teams were exactly the same as mine.  Adding insult to injury, I attended the game in person.

Here’s something ELSE I do know: In 1988 one of the people in the office pool picked Kansas (a #6 seed) as one of their teams.  When he gave me the piece of paper with his five selections I said ‘thanks for the donation’ and then asked him what he was thinking when he picked Kansas.  I’ll bet you can’t guess which team won the tournament.  I’ll also bet you can’t guess who won the office pool.  Me and my big mouth.  From that point forward I quit mocking anyone’s selections because Karma can be an absolute b*tch.

So after 30 years of being ‘that guy’ how have I fared in the pool I organize?  Like I said, Karma can be a b*tch.  You can figure out the rest on your own.

I will, however offer you the guidelines I follow without fail when selecting my five teams every year.  For what it’s worth, I never, ever pick:

·      Teams starting with the letter ‘A’:  Alabama, Auburn, Arkansas, Austin Peay (dammit), Appalachian State, etc.

·      Multi-directional teams (Southwest, Northeast, etc.).

·      Teams from the Big Ten (Why?  Here’s your clue: Illinois.  Also, down here in SEC land we don’t formally recognize the Big Ten).

·      Georgia.   (Note: I always encourage people to pick their alma mater as one of their five teams.   I am a University of Florida alumnus, and I have to admit it’s worked out pretty well since Billy Donovan took over the Gator basketball program in 1996.  As a die hard Gator alum, I wouldn’t pick Georgia to beat a dead horse.   

Once in a while I’ll pick a highly seeded, highly favored team that I really can’t stand as one of my five teams (I’m looking at you, Big Blue).  I figure if they win (as they’re expected to do) that will help me in the office pool.  If they lose it makes losing a whole lot easier to digest and I’ll be totally honest: Sometimes it feels damn good.   

I knew one guy who always picked five ACC teams (he never won the pool).  And another guy who always took the time to do extensive research each year by pouring over power rankings, strength of schedule and the like (he never won the pool either).  Another who picked by how cute the name of the schools’ mascots were (she won the pool).  Or by the color of their uniforms (she won that year as well).

 

The NCAA Basketball Tournament, plain and simple, is a crapshoot.  Heck, even the NCAA itself has implemented two ‘play-in’ games that allows for an additional four teams to participate.  The reason is simple: Each conference has a tournament at the end of the year and should a team with a record of, let’s say 10 – 20 win it ‘muddies the waters’ of putting the 64 ‘best’ teams in the country in the tournament.  So now the NCAA has taken out four ‘insurance policies.’ 

Personally I think the tournament should open itself up to allowing every single college in the country to participate.  It’s not like the powers-that-be have a sure-fire formula for picking the 68 absolute best teams in the country.  And since 68 teams participate already, what’s another 280 or so?  With the potential for added television revenue, I’m surprised the NCAA hasn’t jumped on this one already.   

Besides if every school was invited to play, just imagine:

Colgate could appear on national television as something other than toothpaste.