The Many Uses of the Runner's High

At the Beer Run pre-race, with dog

The gym is quieter today, now that it’s April and people have abandoned their New Year's resolutions. There are more than enough treadmills, and yet the round guy with the rattail of gray hair dangling down his neck chooses one right next to me. Always smiling, he trots away, perhaps finding the power of his olfactory reach amusing. We all passively inhale his pugnacious fumery, and none of us have the balls to react. It's a smoldering, almost peppery smell, a hint of moldy orange peel and vinegar rounds out the bouquet. And something else that reminds me of Los Algodones. The way the dust clung to you. The smell of bad meat cooking. Morning-after tequila breath and sour milk. Wet dog. But a whiff of border pharmacy is ambrosia to you when you are clinging to life suspended on a wire of pain.

So began a story I started to write last year inspired by running. It hasn’t been abandoned entirely – I’m still planning on writing a story with a runner as the narrator. Runners are an interesting breed. Here’s an activity that epitomizes first-world privilege in its simplest form…a person buys special shoes and pants only for the purpose of running in circles going nowhere, only because they might not get exercise at all otherwise. I’m told runners are neurotic – that they run away from intimacy. It’s true most runners run alone. They’re all running from something that’s for damn sure. From fear maybe. From themselves.

I myself ran today for the third time this week. Feels good to get out of the gym, and not only for the reasons implied above. You burn twice the calories in half the time. You see flowers and dogs and sunlight as you go. There’s also a moment during running, usually just under halfway through, just as you are about to give in from the pain in your legs and chest, when the endorphins flood and you suddenly get the feeling you can run for the rest of your life.

Last year's Beer Run with hubby

This rush is what got me through the 2014 Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in Michigan last May. It was my first run of the year – last spring was absolute garbage for weather. Normally I wouldn’t start of the year by running a full 5K, and I hadn’t planned to. My mom had just been diagnosed with cancer again, her breast cancer having metastasized to her liver. I suppose that she had decided to register for the run before the reality set in about her prognosis. So she and I along with our cousin Veronica and her hubby Ken met in Arcadia CreekFestival Place in downtown Kalamazoo with plans to walk it. Before the run began, the entire plaza was abuzz with pink-clad folks stopping by various booths and tents. I got a lovely t-shirt. You could get tote bags, pens, key chains. I pinned on my number and a sign that said, I’m racing for my mom. I got loads of free ibuprofen and naproxen. Plenty of coffee and sticky buns and Danish. I didn’t dare spoil the spirit by commenting on how much actual research might be funded in place of all these giveaways manufactured in the name of awareness.

At some point, a ceremony was held in the amphitheater, in which all survivors among the crowd were to come on stage and be honored in a great show of sisterhood and celebration or what have you. While the charity might give itself a badge for positive attitude, this display brought about a painful moment of clarity for my mother. When I asked her why she wasn’t joining the fray on the stage she said, “I don’t feel like a survivor.” It was then that we wandered over to a table so she could sit down, and she told us (Veronica, really) that she had a year, maybe a year-and-a-half, to live. Prior to this, I hadn’t been able to get much out of her in terms of what her diagnosis really meant, but I understand why she needed Veronica there to say it. I’ve had that kind of woman friend (that kind of woman cousin too) that you can share your pain with when you are too Midwestern to share it with those it will hurt the most.

At Race for the Cure 2014

I haven’t seen my mom break down much. We aren’t a dramatic family. But I still recall the deep sadness in her face that day. It wasn’t fear of death, but the sorrow of losing her life – a life she loved, in which she was finally happy and learning to embrace mindfulness. So much time spent working and studying and caring for others, and now what time she had left for herself was coming to a premature end. It took Susan G to bring this weight down, finally, onto Mom’s shoulders.

I myself couldn’t process it. I put my arm around Mom and tried to ignore the cold creeping in. But Mom couldn’t run or even walk the race. We started out at a decent pace, but in minutes Mom confessed she didn’t feel up to going on and told us to go without her while she waited in the car. For a moment I considered joining her. The point of the day was to be with her after all, and I couldn’t possibly take the time to walk three whole miles while my mom sat brooding alone. So I decided to try and run the thing at full pace – and I did. The entire 5K after not running for six months. You can imagine how my hips retaliated. Major tinwoman syndrome for a week. But I made it back to the car in half an hour to give comfort to my mom while enjoying the brain chemicals I so badly needed.

Today I ran from my sadness and thought of what to write. I imagined myself as all those characters you see running in movies, usually at the beginning to the opening credits, usually a character who’s got some dark secret, like the protagonist of Shame. I felt my heart slamming against my ribcage and my calf muscles pulsing and realized that running is my optimism. I do the PantherProwl and the Beer Run every year to show that my disease hasn’t crippled me. I still have legs and I still have life. Maybe I even hope to extend it. It’s the only one I have after all. 

The Beer Run, by the way, which is part of the Locust Street Festival of Music and Art, is a great event for the beginning runner. It's only about 1.8 miles, and includes stops on the way to enjoy a brief quaff of beer at Riverwest joints Dino's, Lakefront RBC (love that Fixed Gear), Nessun Dorma (a favorite grad student hangout), and Falcon Bowl (complete with polka to cheer you on.) Many walk it. Many dress up like fools for the occasion. If you get hot, worry not, for the local residents enjoy spraying you with hoses as you run by. If you are a real runner, you could conceivably run it, make all the stops, then run it again before it's all over. Nothing like the runner's high added onto a good early summer drunk. It's June 14th. Join me! Let's all run from intimacy together!

Panther Prowl, October 2014

From the Teaching Diaries: Medieval Peer Response

http://www.exploring-castles.com/medieval_castle_layout.html

Peer review is one of the most necessary activities in the writing classroom, and yet it's somehow one of the most boring for students and the most logistically annoying for teachers. For whatever reason  - they don't trust their judgment, they don't want to destroy their classmate's soul, they enjoy reading a student's paper just as much as I enjoy portfolio assessment - they resist it to the point of not doing it. It's not enough to tell them how peer response is really about the student reader, about getting them to reflect on their own writing choices using their peer's work as a lens, that they help themselves by helping someone else revise. You don't want to script their response too much, but you also have to give them something to look for and comment on. No matter what, they despise the activity, and I despise cramming it down their throats.

I actually don't hate commenting on student essays. It's a lot of work, especially when you're doing up to a hundred of the suckers. But I get a charge out of finding those moments where the student actually teaches me something, where I'm compelled to go hmmmmm... I just wish, at peer response time, that the students felt the same way. Instead, they hesitate to do more than correct grammatical errors and write things like "I agree" or :) or :0 or ;).

Since I participated in a forum at UWM on this topic, I've continued to try different approaches to peer review. I'd like to present my latest inventions here. The idea is to get them to make genuine, productive responses to the peer's work which helps them identify what's valuable in writing. The trick is to make them enjoy the activity enough to participate fully and generate new ideas, not just fix errors. I've determined that it's okay to give them something to look for, but it's more effective to conceptualize that target in an engaging way for young writers.

I bring you the Castle Layout Peer Response activity. In this, student identify the different areas of a typical medieval castle, such as the great hall, the towers, the moat, the courtyard, based on the actual functions of those parts. The gatehouse, is the statement or articulation of controlling purpose (thesis). Areas of great importance and centrality such as the Hall and the Inner Courtyard represent important areas of critical inquiry which should be the basis of a good essay. Fringe areas like the towers, and the Outer Courtyard represent avenues of expansion, or possible yet-to-be-made connections. Defense areas like the Barbican and the Moat, represent trouble spots. The idea being that you want to treat your readers like a welcome guest and not an attacker, and you want to appeal to visitors from the outside as well.

Once the student identifies all the parts, she can now construct a castle based on where these elements lie in the paper. The intro, which may contain the gatehouse, will be at the front perhaps. That is, the beginning of the paper is where the reader enters, and they travel from paragraph to paragraph as one would travel to the far end of the castle. This then gives them a spatial sense of the paper's organization...and appeals to the artsy students. My student Joe Robinson can take the credit for this idea.

My student Becca Naughton came up with another. This I call the Triwizard Tournament Peer Response activity. In this case, the "hmmmmm" moment I talk about above is the Dragon Egg, phase one of the tournament from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Once they find the "Egg," they then must find a source that might frame, question, interrogate or otherwise connect to that shining moment. This is the Rescue from the Depths phase...the writer's hesitation being the creepy mermaid keeping that moment's development under the surface. Finally, the student try Negotiating the Labyrinth. They find a way in to that paper for the source, which involves finding possible connections to other places in the essay. (Conveniently, Easter candy is still available at a substantial markdown right now, so I can offer a prize for completion that's very fitting.)

On my own, I came up with the Dominion Dark Ages Peer Response activity. Here the students draw cards from Dominion, a dynamic card game from Rio Grande games. What they do to their peer's paper depends on the role depicted on the card, for example:

Mercenary: Delete two sentences or passages from the essay by crossing them out. You may decide what can go based on your sense of the writer’s purpose, or on your own interest (or lack thereof) in those passages.

Spoils: Circle one passage that’s a real treasure. You enjoyed it, were surprised by it, learned something, etc…

Beggar: Underline something in the paper that tells you something you didn’t know.

And so on and so forth.  This has the potential for students to do many cards, sometimes repeating if it works out that way. There's a lot of opportunity for mass deleting also - crossing out of vast amounts of the essay's text - which leaves them with what might be viewed as the paper's guts. It's very satisfying, as is throwing cards into the "Trash" when you play Dominion:Dark Ages. 

Heck, I've considered giving the students markers and crayons and having them go through and make a humument out of the thing. Feels good to delete.

And now I'm going to go play Dominion with my husband. Dorks of a feather.

The To-Do List and Other Incantations

Me and Mom, when perms were in

I have been on a real poetry stint lately. In the last two weeks I read Life in a Box is a Pretty Life by Dawn Lundy Martin, Girl King by my colleague Bri Cavallaro, and Apprenticed to Justice by UWM poet and Wisco’s new Poet Laureate, Kim Blaeser. In Apprenticed, there is a great poem titled “What They Did by Lamplight,” which is two of my favorite things, 1) a visual poem. (The lines form the shape of a lamp.) and 2) a list. It’s all verbs, because it is exactly what the title implies. I haven’t done a piece made of a list of verbs, and I think that’s because a list of what most people do now would be the worst poem ever. This is an awesome poem that works because it’s about the activities of traditional indigenous women in a new world. How lame is this list for instance:

What I Did the Day Before Easter, Wisconsin, 2015

fed Dog, gave Dog medicine, picked up Dog’s poop with a plastic-sheathed hand

drank black coffee, ate Honey Nut

kissed Husband, smelled his hair

lifted weights, worked lats

pretended movement on a machine that imitates movement

sweated a lot

missed my mother, felt sad

snuggled with Husband and Dog

took Husband and Dog to the park, threw sticks, shot video

wiped counter and stove tops, cleaned inside the microwave, scoured the sink

scrubbed boiler plates, swept and mopped floors, watered plants

put off the blog, put off grading papers, put off so much

made snacks

watched the basketball game, drank beer, fell off the veggie wagon and ate a bratwurst

cheered, drank shots of cherry McGillicuddy’s, something called an Egg Nog shot, and

Jameson shots

missed my nephew

hugged my friend

slept in bed until Husband started snoring, slept on couch until sunup

dreamed Dog was eaten by a shark

Doesn’t have the same ring about it. My to-do list would be even more boring and six pages long. Just like every woman, I have an ongoing relationship with to-do lists. Blaeser’s poem and the concept were very inspirational to me this week. But that relationship has changed since my mom died.

It’s been six months since Mom’s memorial, and I’m doing well by getting through the days one at a time. I wasn’t ready for Mom to die. I selfishly looked forward to taking care of her in the end as I always planned to anyway. I set aside three weeks of leave thinking I would spend entire time by her side. Instead I stayed with her two days, spent a week planning/mourning/crying, then went right back to work. Not teaching, but certainly not taking time off. Here’s a sad list I think I need to make:

October 2014, Hospice

bought her a white scented candle

pinned her cards and letters to the cork board

watered her flowers

drink a glass of wine with her

adjusted her pillow

kissed her and said she was a good mother

didn’t know if she believed me

didn’t burn the candle

didn’t read Marge Piercy poems

didn’t fall asleep on the cot listening to Tina Turner

closed her eyes for her

This is so hard. I wish I had talked to people who lost their moms more. I just figured they didn’t want to talk about it because I myself was so not ready for it. But had I talked to my friend Lisa, or my husband's boss Roseanne, or my high school classmate Chelsea, or my cousin Crissy, or even my stepmom Cheryl, they would have told me, as Cheryl did after the fact: you’re never ready. You could be 99 and she could be 150. My advice: count on it hurting like hell. Don’t even try to imagine it, because you can’t.

needs dusting

needs put away

Since then I have stopped making to do lists. I do what’s necessary to get through the day – that day only. I still need Mom. Knowing she’s not there, I can’t see far ahead enough to make a full to-do list. Because a woman’s to-do list never comes to an end, but lives on in perpetuity, oftentimes cycling and repeating like the harvest. Paint toenails. Spring clean. Read. Write. Read. Write. Apply to this job. Apply to that job. Submit stories. Apply for consolidation. Buy lotion. Buy toothpaste. Blah blah blah.

 

all not read yet

Instead I am doing exactly what I need to do from one day to the next. That’s because every day feels like I’m bicycling along a tightrope with a pole across my lap and no net underneath me. Mom was my net.

Don’t worry. I’m not putting things like, take a shower, brush my teeth, get dressed, and eat on a to-do list. Those are givens, and the day they aren’t is the day I go to the doc. I am already putting myself on a vitamin D regimen to prevent that from happening. An excuse to drink orange juice anyway (but not favoring vegetarians much). But I am limiting my tasks to avoid immediate consequences only. Or breaking my New Year’s resolution which is to do this blog every Thursday (with a possible extension to Sunday – happy Easter everyone!).

What follows is both what was on my to-do list in my mind (it’s ever present) and what I actually did:

Easter Sunday 2015

drink black coffee

cling to bed

separate eggs, beat whites into peaks, grind oatmeal with yolks and cottage cheese

remember Grandma, feel sad

brown ham steaks

eat everything drenched in maple syrup

feed Husband and Dog, smile

snuggle with Dog, listen to comedy on TV

blog about my grief

miss Mom, cry a little

go to bed with Husband, who’s feeding me later

dream about meatloaf and instant mashed potatoes

Go Badgers!