30 June 2003

The Running Dream

I woke this morning from the running dream. You may know it. It is the one where a sea of adversaries of fantastic shape, both known and unknown oppose you and you flail at them, sometimes landing a good one but it doesn't matter. The motion continues and the scenes roll on and at some point you are awake again, almost out of breath from the exertion in the dream. A dream that always includes running, feet bogged in mud or sand and lungs heaving. They say that everyone has the dream, or a variation of it. It is odd, this dream, because when I could run and I was in training, I could go for hours. Effortless, free as the wind. The dream doesn't come to me often but when it does I awake un-refreshed and it is a Monday.

There was no reason for the dream to come, unless it was the re-occurrence of the first working day of the week. There is nothing out of the ordinary going on. There has been no update on how the two American soldiers- kids- who were kidnapped from their check point in Baghdad were murdered. To mop up the resistance Task Force Ironhorse raided homes in the vicinity overnight, a massive sweep, striking at two in the morning when some Iraqis would be having their own running dreams. They arrested sixty-odd men and I wondered if my dream was connected to this open-ended campaign in the darkness, our collective feet bogged in treacherous terrain.

There are some important anniversaries, of course. On this day in 1997 the Union Jack came down for the last time over Government House as Britain prepared to hand the colony back to China after ruling it for 156 years. I loved Hong Kong, and love it still, I suppose. There was still a lingering sense that Suzie Wong in her long formal gown with the high collar might still be in the Wonchai District when I first went there twenty-five years ago. Jimmy's Kitchen was still the place to go on Victoria Island and the new branch over in Kowloon was fun, if a little less formal. The smell of the Star Ferry and small luxury of First Class passage across the harbor and High Tea at The Peninsula. And the marvelous bar at the Repulse Bay Hotel served the finest gin and tonic on the planet. If you knew your history, that the hotel had been the internment point for the captured British when the Japanese occupied the Crown Colony, then the seating of the guests from Tokyo in the very middle of the dining room far from the windows or the view, made perfect sense.

Saturday was a commemoration of another event, one a little closer to home. My friend Mohammed and his new bride completed an eight-mile walk to commemorate the Trail of Tears. He wrote to say that they walked to honor and lay to rest some of those killed by soldiers and the cold and sickness on the six-month forced march. It was a slow motion running dream, a nightmare of relocation. My pal knows his history. He remembers that it was Tom Jefferson who pushed for Indian removal as early as 1776, and it was Andrew Jackson who betrayed his Choctaw allies from Pensacola and New Orleans to force them down the long sad road west.

Then in the immediacy of the near-present, the great running motion of time came the word that Kate Hepburn left us yesterday. She transitioned out of the running dream at the age of 96. She seemed to have lived the century on her own terms, a woman who had the good luck to be able to play herself on the screen. She put Jimmy Stewart and Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart in their places and was the last prominent link to a golden age of film. I was startled to think that her role with Hank Fonda in "On Golden Pond" was over twenty years ago. I will never forget her line from "The Lion in Winter," when she had a fight of Royal proportions with Peter O'Toole and then gazed into the camera and announced dry and deadpan the "Every family has its problems." She lived her life pretty much on her terms and I don't suppose there is much more you can ask for in life.

Which is pretty much where my younger son is coming from. When I logged on the system this morning there was a video clip on the AOL Homepage showing a party thrown by Saddam's son Uday. It was filled with secularly-dressed women and plenty of likker. Kids! They are the same the world over, even if they are bloodthirsty criminals. In Iran it is the kids and their crazy internet flashing porn at the Mullahs, ten percent of the Islamic State now wired to the World Wide Web and the clerics don't know what to do.

I knew how the Mullahs must be feeling. My son had been at Beach Week, the rite of passage that follows graduation from High School. I had been filled with a certain low-grade anxiety all week over how he was doing. I called his cell phone late on Saturday, thinking that his lease had expired that morning and he was probably approaching Washington. I was gratified to note that he had survived. He and 28 of his closest friends secured a week's lease on a decrepit house in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He was not arrested, which was one of the big accomplishments of the week-long event. He was still fresh from it and I was able to pry a few stories of a week out of control from him, and I got some more texture at lunch on Sunday. He was irked that his older brother and I did not get beer to go with our sandwiches. I told him that Beach Week was over, but that I was glad he had kept his wits about him.

It was colorful, this adventure in grown-up independence. They had stopped at the venerable "J.R.'s Cigars" at the South Carolina border, near the South of the Border Motor Hotel empire. He said he had purchased a long cigar but that he did not recall if he had smoked it. I did not ask if they had stopped at the fireworks stand, since you can purchase 1/8 sticks of dynamite there that masquerade as amusement devices. They had checked into the house and he and three friends had found the room with the newest window air conditioning unit. I cast my memory back across the musty years, down the long run from my own graduation. I could smell the disintegration and sweat of a week of beer drinking and long cigars. He said that the South Carolinians were remarkably casual in their approach to the legal drinking age, which appeared to be whatever was photocopied on the crude fake ID that several of them had. They were served in public restaurants, and that filled him with a sense of maturity that was almost as palpable as the gun that was pulled on one of his best friends on Friday night. That would have made me want to run, legs pounding and feet mired, and I was just as pleased not to know.

The cross-town rival high school crowd had rented the house next door to my son's and they got ejected from their place for public indecency two days early. Four kids were under arrest, procedural issues, mostly, and then there was the tale of the athlete headed for Notre Dame. He was one of the few of them who had the potential to move to the next level from high school sports and he maybe even has shot at The Show. He is a big kid, and big kids, even well-mannered ones, get picked on by feisty little punks who would be better off in the Marine Corps. He was dragged into into an alcohol-and-testosterone-fueled fight with some aggressive little twit but got caught up in the moment and finished the altercation on his terms. The twit was all broken up. There were some semi-serious serious assault charges which went along with the blood, and some phone calls to South Bend. I asked my son if the kick to the face was necessary at the conclusion, and he allowed as how it had just played out that way.

The Coaching staff at Notre Dame reportedly told the athlete not to sweat it too hard, that things like this happen all the time.

Beach Week is over. Seven weeks and the boys are both in college. All I need to do is pay for it. Maybe that is why I sometimes feel like my feet are caught in the sand.