The Captain’s Log

Despite the craziness inherent in opening a boarding school for the semester, I got a fair amount of play time in this week. Monday I stomped down the hill, up the hill, down the hill, then back up the hill again. Tuesday I tootled the dusty trails in my backyard–some very sweet singletrack beaten in by the racers at the West Hill Shop race in June. I also made it to the weight room and benched much too much, but kept the rest of the workout below the redline. Wednesday, I was pretty much reduced to riding to and from work, but yesterday I had a full-on backyard blast with Dr. Dizzle. My favorite line of the afternoon was “Too bad we can’t race as a team.” What the Diz meant was I’m the guy who waits at the top of the hill and he’s the guy who waits at the bottom. But I think his downhill skills far surpass my uphill chops. Nonetheless, we were oxygen deficient enough when he said it to nearly have simultaneous heart attacks. Today I hammered desk work until 6:40. Gotta take the good with the bad. I’ll have my revenge tomorrow. I finally feel like I had enough outings this week to support some weekend warrioring. Is that a word? I hear road miles calling my name.

Dizzle also laid this way cool movie on me last night called Joe Kid on a Stingray: The History of BMX. I had no idea I’d be as into it as I was, because I never raced BMX or freestyled, but for a few kick turns on a low ramp. But I was a Stingray rider in the 60′s. My buddies and I would stage downhill races on construction sites with cliffhanger roadways. We always had at least two more riders than could fit across the road. It was all about the full contact and crashing. This movie was just like that, but told by these middle-aged geezers like me who, like me, were right back there when they were telling their stories. And when they talked about the endgames of their various careers, I felt it. I was a roadie and, later, a mountain biker–but the feeling of being an indestructible rock star was the same. To this day, I remember what it sounds like to race around Hartford, Connecticut’s Bushnell Park with 20,000 people screaming at us. And then you get older, slower, less motivated and so forth and somebody comes along to fill your place. On a lot of levels, I’ve never really recovered from all that. It was our war. It was where we did our battles, had our victories, suffered our losses.
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…which is why it’s been so quiet here, I guess. And the smell of burning carpet. That happens when I think, too.

We’ve muddled through another summer, also known as the season when most parents of school-aged children jump through hoops to keep the kids safe and amused while they try hard to remain employed. Have I ranted about this before? Stop me if I have.

What is it about this country’s infrastructure that assumes all families have two fully functional parents and that at least one of them doesn’t work–or doesn’t work as a teacher? The typical work day is 9 to 5. The typical school day is 8:20 to 3:00. The typical vacation schedule for a nine to fiver is two weeks the after the first year, maybe three weeks after five years and that’s usually about the limit. Typical school vacations are considerably more–11 or 12 weeks in the summer, a week at Thanksgiving, Christmas, President’s Week and Spring Break. And if you’re on a private boarding school schedule, toss in most of March.
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