ever-fixed mark

Husband and I made a last-minute decision to get away sans enfants for two days, and because we are booking so late in peak vacation season (coinciding with the only good weather we’ve had all summer), we’ve had a hard time finding lodging that meets our requirements. Basically, we want something that’s less pricey than a luxury inn, but not as folksy as a bed-and-breakfast.

An old friend of mine from the Peace Corps, I’m told, has opened a bed and breakfast not too far away, and another mutual Peace Corps friend suggested that I book a room under my married name and show up to surprise her. Back in the day, my relationship with the innkeeper was intermittently fractious — I can’t remember why — and that scenario suggests to me that episode of “The Office” where Pam and Jim stay on Dwight’s beet farm, which he’s converted to a B&B. It actually sounded kind of quirky and fun, not to mention rife with dramatic possibilities, but the B&B in question is not on a lake, and I intend to take advantage of the nice weather in my kayak.

The trouble with most inns in New England is that they’re not different enough from what we’re leaving behind. I mean, if I wanted to sleep in a drafty Victorian with rickety furniture and funky wallpaper, I could just stay home — and here, Dog is allowed. Now that I think about it, wouldn’t it be awesome if we opened a B&B here? We have three unused bedrooms that could be outfitted at minimal expense, and a dining room that is never used that could hold three couples for breakfast. As long as our guests were down with our “slacker hospitality” ethic, we could probably bring in a little cash.

It sounds like the premise for one of those hugely successful, double-titled, memoirish non-fiction books you can’t believe someone published and wish you had written: “A Year of Bed-and-Breakfast: How I Opened My Heart by Opening My Home as a B&B,” or some such. It would be divided into twelve chapters, one for each month, each containing a story about one of the wonderfully wacky guests and a seasonal recipe for a breakfast food.

Doesn’t that sound like the most perfect amalgamation of A Year in Provence, Eat, Pray, Love, and Julie and Julia? I’m going to write a proposal right now.

Husband and I hate yard work so much that we took pains to buy one of the only houses in town without a lawn. Even so, there is still a troublesome border sprouting weeds along three sides of the house. Once a year, my mother pulls all the weeds and puts mulch down, but they always grow back. She must be doing it wrong.

This year, a rather purposeful-looking plant sprouted right next to the back door. “Weed or not?” I wondered, and then one day it threw up a large, pretty yellow flower. My parents cleaned out the border to give it some room to grow, put down more mulch, and then put up some edging so we would stop treading on it. Other plants of the same type took root and fluorished, but we still had no idea what it was.

One day our babysitter was dropping off the boys and exclaimed, “You’re growing pumpkins? How did you get them to take? Mine have never turned out so well.”

Pumpkins?!

Rewind to Halloween, when like most of our neighbors we (nominally) decorated our doorstops with pumpkins. Unlike most of our neighbors, though, we pretty much let the pumpkins sit out and rot until it snowed and we didn’t have to think about them anymore. The seeds must have dropped into the soil, and then Nature took its course.

There are some benefits to sloth.

Last week at work, I unexpectedly won two tickets to the Bruce Springsteen concert. I haven’t been moved to buy tickets to see Springsteen since 1988, when I saw him as part of the line-up in the Amnesty International “Human Rights Now” tour in Philly. But I like Bruce — who doesn’t? — and maybe it was the “unexpected” part, or the “free” part, but I was unaccountably excited to see the show. He did not disappoint.

The Boss holds a special place in the lore of the small liberal-arts college where I did my undergrad. In 1974, before he made it big, he played our dining hall. Lord knows what he thought of the handful of preppy clones from the Land that F.M. Radio Forgot who turned out to see him. Bruce’s subsequent fame, of course, ensured that they never forgot him and guaranteed them a sure-fire cocktail-party story for years to come.

That was before my time. My college cohort also has a concert story, but one that lives in infamy. When I was a junior, the concert committee booked Stevie Ray Vaughan to play the spring festival, but they had to cancel him when the student body purchased only eight tickets. (I wasn’t one of them; I had neither the musical chops nor the $40 to spare.) Thus, we missed the opportunity to see one of the greatest rock guitarists before his death.

I had three goals for the big ten-mile race this year:

Let’s see how I did, shall we?

We started off slowly enough, thanks to the crowd. I had vowed to try to stay with my friends for at least a few miles, with a stretch goal of running at their 10-minute mile pace for the whole thing. So when they picked up the pace, so did I. I was feeling a bit winded already by the half-mile mark, when I told them I wanted to run on the right side of the street for a bit so I could wave to the kids as we passed my house. I moved to the right: no kids. I moved to the left: no friends. I picked up the pace even more, hoping to catch up with them, but they were nowhere to be found in the crowd. At the one-mile point I marked the split time with my watch and goggled when I saw 9:17:59 — much, much faster than I wanted to be.

I slowed down a bit but felt pressured by all the runners passing me. I knew from experience that by mile 7 many of them would be walking, while I would still be running, but I still didn’t feel like I could slow down to a comfortable pace. For mile 2, my pace was 9:30; mile 3, 10:11. I felt the worst between mile markers 3 and 4, just like last year, and finally decided I was going to have to slow way down or I wouldn’t be able to finish. I was hot and thirsty and rubber-legged and felt just generally weak and awful. I was cheered here and there by the appearance of my friend C., the one who said to me in April 2007, “We’re doing the 10-mile race this year,” who had run the race with me last year but damaged her ankle so badly during the race she hadn’t been able to run since. She was dashing around on her bike intercepting the runners here and there, shouting encouragement. I ran mile 4 at 11:09 and started to feel more of a rhythm. I finished mile 5 at 11:50 and panicked a bit — too slow! — but by then I was rounding the corner to The Hill and my only concern was getting up without stopping.

Hills have never bothered me; I grew up running hills, and I always treat them as something to get over as quickly as possible. I felt physically awful going up that hill, but I didn’t feel intimidated. When I got to the top, this sense of relief washed over me, but at the same time I felt like quitting. I wasn’t having fun. Running alone was not exhilarating; it seemed pointless. By now I had learned, through C., that one of my running buddies was about five minutes ahead of me, and the other about five minutes behind. At this point I thought seriously about running back to meet my friend. I turned around to see if I could spot her winding around the course, but my body recoiled at the thought of retracing a step.

My splits were getting slower and slower, but I still felt like I was working hard. My left foot and leg started cramping, something that had never happened to me in 25 years of running. Suddenly, I remembered that I had given up bananas that week in an effort to cut some calories. Now, I’ve eaten a banana almost every day for most of my life, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realized that the potassium was the only thing preventing my muscles from knotting up into big painful charleyhorses. Idiot!

I had reached the cool, shady part of the course where last year I had gotten a second wind. It was about this point that C. caught up with me again. She could see that I was hurting, and she rode alongside me for the remaining four miles, keeping up a steady stream of conversation and organizing all the people she recognized along the race route to cheer for me, personally, by name. Might I have finished without her? Maybe. Would I have had any fun without her? Definitely not. She totally got me through it, and I was grateful that I got a chance to “run” it with her again.

I finished in 1:50 and change, an eleven-minute pace. When I got home and looked up the results, I saw that this year I was not dead last in the Middle Aged Fat Lady division; I was 88th out of 91. Whoo-hoo! Also, I beat one of the deputies that C. and I smoked during the Frigid Fiver two years ago, and this year I had the pleasure of beating the county sheriff as well.

I may be a Middle Aged Fat Lady, but I can still outrun the Law.

It has been storming continually for about a week here: round-the-clock thunder and lightning, like those scenes in the first season of “Battlestar Galactica” where Helo and Sharon are fleeing the Cylons on post-apocalypse Caprica. You know those scare stories that the local news runs every summer, about people getting struck by lightning? Well, NPR ran one last week. NPR! You know it’s bad when your Serious News Outlet features “When Weather Attacks.”

There was one break in the weather, Saturday, which was the day I had planned to take Aitch camping. The local wildlife refuge was running a special one-night family camp-out, a sort of Camping Lite for those of us who are not completely one with nature. The idea is that we would come in after dinner, pitch our tents by the visitors’ center, go on a hike, come back and have snacks and stories in the barn, brush our teeth in the restroom, then bed down. The following morning we would have breakfast, go on another hike, and then leave.

It sounded like a great way to camp without all the muss and fuss of cooking over a fire, peeing in the woods, and so forth, but after I signed up and got the schedule in the mail I began to have some reservations. Aitch has historically not been good with structured group activities. He does fine at school, but when we have tried to enroll him in some type of lesson or class, he can be really resistant. I suppose I should be worried, but I have chalked it up to his being a Not Quite Five who needs to do his own thing when he breaks loose from school. If he doesn’t want swim lessons or karate classes or soccer right now (or, frankly, ever) that is OK by me; from what I’ve seen we’re not risking any great loss of scholarship money by failing to hone his skills at this critical juncture. So I have adopted a policy of enrolling him only in one-off activities, and then only if I can accept his bailing out after five minutes. I decided I could accept that outcome, although I really hoped that we could have a nice mommy-and-son trip.

I had to wake Aitch from an unplanned nap to get to the campsite on time (Danger, Will Robinson!) and then tear him from the arms of the father he had not seen for a week (Danger!), but he was in a good, if silly, mood as we put up the tent. The camp leaders really did run a tight ship; after half an hour they briskly called us together to commence hiking. We had not yet finished putting up the rain canopy on the tent, but the leader said, “Oh, you won’t need that, it’s going to be so hot tonight,” and I thought about the weather forecast and how nice it would be to see starts through the tent mesh, and I agreed.

The hike was an hour and a half in duration, conducted at the measured pace of the leader. Our boys are not able to keep a measured pace off-leash any more than the dog can, and I found myself having to tell Aitch to slow down, or hurry up, or stop digging for worms, and kind of resenting it all the while. I mean, I understand the value in a group activity, but this was camping. Shouldn’t the kids be running barefoot through the woods wielding sharpened sticks? Then after about half an hour, Aitch started complaining about bugs. I had not lavished DEET on his head and face, as I always do for myself, thinking to preserve his fertility for future years. The skeeters were fierce, though, some of the worst I’ve endured. Lately I’ve been noticing that Aitch’s best tantrums are accompanied by allergic reactions. I’m not sure if the allergy causes the bad behavior, or the tantrum just exacerbates his allergies, but I did know that I was not looking forward to a public meltdown in the woods. Luckily, he held it together until we made it back to the barn for snacks.

Finally, the kids were able to relax and play freely for a bit, but then the leaders decided to read a story. They chose a compelling tale about the founding of the Audubon society. A sample:

Fashion was killing birds as well as women’s chances to have the right to vote and be listened to. For who would listen to a woman with a dead bird on her head? And if the senseless slaughter for a silly fashion was not stopped, in a few years the birds with the prettiest feathers would all be dead, gone forever, extinct.

This is not exactly the kind of deathless prose that inspires five-year-old boys to sit open-jawed around a campfire. I had to ask Aitch to settle down a few times, and I was getting kind of irritated at the situation and tired of the sound of my own voice. He was, though, as well-behaved as could be expected.

Finally we settled down to bed. It took Aitch a while to fall asleep (he was, no doubt, contemplating the origins of the Audubon society), but he was happy. And I was relieved that we’d made it through the whole evening without any major incidents or demands to go home.

I woke up around 4:00 to rumbling sounds. “Amazing,” I thought, “You can hear the highway all the way back here.”

Then there were flashes. “Heat lightning,” I thought.

More rumbles. More flashes. I looked up and realized I could no longer see the stars through the mesh in the tent. The weather report had lied, and I was going to be struck by lightning and, even if I lived, I would set off metal detectors for the rest of my life, just like the people on NPR!

Maybe it will pass, I thought.

Then I heard the pitter-patter of raindrops on the tent. “We left off the rain canopy,” I remembered. (Reading comprehension test: did you catch the foreshadowing way up there in paragraph 4?) We had two choices: Put up the canopy before the storm hit, then wait out the dangerous part in the barn; or just strike the tent and get out of there. We opted for the latter, and managed to get everything packed up right before the worst of it. I felt like an idiot for not putting up the canopy in the first place, but in the circumstances I think it was the best we could do.

So, after a rainy Sunday and Monday we are experiencing another storm-free day — so far. It happens to be Race Day, and now I can add to my list of Race Worries (number 1: the starter’s pistol will trigger a Pavlovian response in the form of a need to urinate) fear that I will get caught in a freak thunderstorm.

With any luck, the lightning will give me superpowers, like the ability to run ten ten-minute miles.

When you run, you get to know the quirks and features of all the houses on your routes. Occasionally, you get curious to match a face with a home, and even more rarely, you run by when one of the owners is on the porch or in the yard. (For the record, the guy whose pickup truck has the Confederate flag painted on his tailgate looks exactly like I expected him to.)

Yesterday, I ran by a particular house and saw the door open. “Ooh, I’ve been wondering who lives there,” I thought, “because —” Then I couldn’t remember what was so interesting about that house. Something political?

Then I spotted it: a bumper sticker that read, “This is America: Speak English.”

What is it with Americans and their foreign language phobia? Were we all so traumatized by our high school language requirement? I myself suffered for three years at the hands of Frau “Eva” Braun, but I can hear German spoken on the street without turning into a raving lunatic.

Alas, it happened so quickly that I totally lost the opportunity to greet my neighbor with a friendly “Salem w’aleikum!”

Next time.

I recently read a review of a book called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. It’s like one of those “100 best” lists on steroids. Typically, I will have read a respectable percentage of books on most lists (English major, no social life as a teenager, lived in North Africa with no TV for three years = lots of reading time). But I hadn’t read most of (nor even heard of some of) the books named in the review.

Then I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a list that didn’t inspire either misplaced pride or self-loathing? How about a list of just really satisfying reads? I decided to compile one. It’s completely idiosyncratic, reflecting my taste only. There’s not a “should” or a “must” on this list. If on your deathbed you realize you haven’t read a one of these, you have my permission to die happy nonetheless.

My criteria for a satisfying reading experience are people (memorable characters); place (evocative setting); and plot (a good, chewy, complicated, surprising, yet grounded-in-reality story line). Here, in alphabetical order, are my top ten:

Charlotte Brontë, Villette. I’ve never met anyone who likes Villette as much as I do, and I haven’t met very many people who have liked it at all. There’s something about this novel, though, that tugs at my heartstrings. Lucy is one of the few examples in nineteenth-century literature of a truly independent woman who comes and goes as she pleases. She and Paul are both quirky characters, like no one I’ve ever met in real life, yet I have no problem believing that they could be real people. And I just love how Brontë takes the story down a fairly traditional path for the first half, and you’re pretty sure you know exactly where she’s going, and then Bam! left turn.

Robertson Davies, The Cornish Trilogy. This series by the renowned Canadian author — The Rebel Angels, What’s Bred in the Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus — is artsy (dealing with writers, painters, and musicians, respectively), juicy, and meaty. Thanks to Davies, I knew who Paracelsus was when I applied for a job at a company named after him (hint: feces is involved). And, bonus: According to Wikipedia, “Davies is one of the authors mentioned in the Moxy Früvous song ‘My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors.’”

Charles Dickens, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. Both of these books are great in the same way, so I couldn’t choose one. They both have memorable characters and a plot you could get lost in for days. I’m tempted to give the edge to Bleak House, but that may be because I enjoyed the BBC adaptation so much. (Check it out: Scully is amazing as Lady Dedlock, and Mr. Guppy is not to be believed).

Louise FitzHugh, Harriet the Spy. Never gets old; feels like it was written yesterday, especially since Harriet’s journal is kind of a proto-blog. As someone who wants to be a writer when I grow up, but only manages to record gossip about my surroundings, I still identify with Harriet.

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. I read this in college for a class Brit Lit, fell instantly under its spell, and have fallen in love again on every re-reading, although I can’t really put my finger on why. It’s a great example of an unreliable narrator, and also is one of those books that makes you wonder how the British maintained their empire for so long.

E.M. Forster, Howards End. Every person in this book seems like someone I wouldn’t like in real life, and yet I love them all. That’s kind of the point of the book; that our life’s work is “only to connect” with others, and that if we try hard enough we can connect across class, across politics — even across artistic sensibilities, or lack of them.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters. This is one of Gaskell’s less melodramatic, more bittersweetly realistic stories. You’ll come for the romance but you’ll stay for the characterizations. Her depiction of a blended family, neither blissfully happy nor utterly miserable, is a highlight.

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure. Jude stands out on this list as one of the few without a happy ending, but I’ve always liked Hardy, and something about Jude’s aspirations to the university gripped me. I may have been overly influenced by the movie adaptation with Kate Winslet as Sue Bridehead (another independent female, at least for a while).

Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet. This set of books was the basis for the “Jewel in the Crown” BBC miniseries. I read the books back in college, saw the miniseries recently, and then re-read the books. The kernel of the story is the rape of an Englishwoman in in India during World War II. Over four volumes, Scott returns to this story again and again, exploring it from different angles, adding details from different viewpoints, and weaving in other stories as well. His point of view is mostly English, but his sympathies are more balanced than in a lot of colonial lit.

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle. This is a fairy tale that is completely grounded in reality. I somehow missed it when I was sixteen, but it was just as good when I caught up with it in my thirties. The setting is especially magical. Smith also wrote 101 Dalmatians, a book I also loved as a child.

Anthony Trollope, the Palliser novels. It took me a long while to get to Trollope. I was underwhelmed by the Barsetshire chronicles in college, and then read Phineas Finn when I was in the Peace Corps and thought there could not be a duller subject for a novel than Parliament. Trollope impressed me as one of those quiet, “domestic” novelists. A few years ago, though, I caught the BBC adaptation of The Way We Live Now on TV and saw how wickedly sharp he could be. I consequently picked up The Eustace Diamonds and really admired how Trollope made avaricious Lizzy sort of sympathetic during the marvelous hunting scenes. Then I read all six pretty much non-stop, even Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux. The day I put the last one down was a solemn day in my life.

Connie Willis, Doomsday Book. Willis is a sci-fi writer who has written two time-travel novels: this one, and the considerably lighter To Say Nothing of the Dog. Doomsday Book is set in future England (where, as Husband is fond of pointing out, they’ve invented time travel but still can get a busy signal when they place a “trunk call”) and in England during the Plague. I found it entertaining on so many levels — as a historical novel, as a mystery, and as traditional sci-fi. It really brought the Black Death, uh, alive for me.

What’s on your “most satisfying” list?

Damn. I just spotted a guy running down the high road pushing this stroller containing what appeared to be three sleeping three-year-olds. That’s about a hundred pounds of kid being propelled down the main thoroughfare at six miles an hour in very heavy traffic.

Dude, I cyber-salaam you. You are truly worthy of the medal.

…a purple speedo with a red swim cap that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.

As you’ve no doubt heard, Dara Torres, a 41-year-old mother of a toddler, qualified for the Olympic swim team last weekend. Score one for the middle-aged athlete! She didn’t just qualify — she bested her own record AND smoked the competition.

I’m not the only one who found this surprising, because swimming is a sport that owes more to physicality than strategy. I mean, it’s a sport where body hair is an impediment; one would think that the depredations of age and child-rearing would automatically disqualify an athlete from the top ranks. I heard a commenter on NPR, though, say that because swimming comes down to fractions of a second, it causes intense psychological pressure, and therefore a seasoned athlete does have an advantage.

I’ve never swum competitively, so I can’t speak to that. But I do know that after more than 25 years of running, I can (finally!) go farther and faster than I did when I was 16.

I have been training again this year for our town’s 10-mile race, and one of the women I have been running with likes to keep a 10-minute-mile pace whether she’s doing three miles or ten. On long runs, I often succeed in slowing her down (you’re welcome!), but overall she has succeeded in speeding me up (thanks!). Last weekend, we did a little over 10 miles at a pace between 10 and 10.5 minutes per mile.

When I was 16, I would never have thought to run that far. The most we ran in practice was 7 miles; although there were marathons and other long road races back then, average people didn’t compete in them. (Also, if I ran for more than an hour I would have had to flip the tape on my Walkman twice, and who wants to listen to the same music?)

So here I am, thanks to the miracle of modern iPod technology and a running partner who is half my size and twice my speed; stronger and faster. Just like Dara.